Technology has connected the world—but not people. The submarine cable encircling the globe, endless fiber-optic networks, and constant online presence have created an illusion of global accessibility and unity, but they haven’t taught us to understand one another. It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about our neighbors on the landing or entire nations: the dialogue eventually inevitably unravels.
The same thing happened this time as well: in April, Anya Zholud was hospitalized in serious condition and ceased all contact with others. All that she managed to convey to us before communication was lost were three things: the word “paragraph” (which she repeated continuously during our last meeting), a wish to launch the project in early May (as though sensing the network disruptions that would occur around that time), and several dozen nearly abstract sculptures made of metal rods.
The resulting exhibition became a reflection of the artist’s sudden isolation. Because of the forced pause in dialogue, the word “paragraph” became our key to deciphering the entire series.A paragraph is a break in thought — on the page, it takes the form of an empty space, an indentation at the beginning of a line. Yet it is precisely this graphic interruption that transforms text into a coherent and continuous narrative.
Such is Anya Zholud’s new series of works. This time, while continuing to use her signature material — the metal rod — the artist abandoned its familiar function. Where previously she used it to sketch the “contours” of everyday objects (irons, kettles, beds, televisions), revealing their hollowness and material frailty, now the rod itself has become the object — an ordinary wire.
And yet what is meant to ensure unity and seamless functioning is broken. Some wires were violently torn apart; others coiled and hung in a row. They’ve remained unused for so long that they’ve sagged under their own weight and snapped. This new sculptural series no longer speaks of “the interconnectedness of everything,” unlike the similarly shaped installation Communications, which the artist created for the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009. Back then, the metal wires extended into spatial drawings, seemingly wrapping the entire pavilion in an illusory web. Now, by contrast, the work reveals a universal disconnection — not the hollowness of individual things, but of the world itself, which countless communication systems have failed to hold together.
But Zholud’s exhibition is not a manifesto of hopelessness. Broken — and especially severed — connections do not disappear without a trace. It is precisely the malfunction of the network that reveals its extreme materiality and fragility.In essence, it is the sudden breakdown of what had merely served as the background of everyday life — what had simply functioned day after day — that allows us to feel the surrounding space and time, and our own embeddedness within their being.
The emptiness of a white wall becomes perceptible only at the moment when the torn ends of a single wire hang along its edges. A stream of words becomes text only when structured by the space of a paragraph indent. Only the absence of a person reminds us how precious the connection with them truly is.
Dmitry Belkin