Alexander Shchurenkov’s Solo Project

“Once it happened, backfired” is a reflection of the artist on his past experience — the events that a person tries in vain to retain in his memory. The theme emerges as a kind of promise of getting acquainted and penetrating into a personal story and of immersing oneself in an account of what has happened. The viewer trustfully accepts this promise and, convinced by the artist of the correctness of his interpretations, becomes involved in a system of deceptively simple signs. The images, perceived as familiar and close, suddenly slip away from the viewer’s recognition: they neither reveal or clarify nor refer to anything.

The viewer may wonder why Shchurenkov employs all these “traps” of perception. The reason is that they are not just used to destroy a narrative and create a situation where it is impossible to imagine a coherent story but also serve as a means of transferring the event and its experience from a self-evident narrative into the space of the act of recollection itself. “I am talking about something” gives way to a very different semantic figure: “I am talking about how I am recalling something,” or — “I am talking about the desire to recall, and even a Japanese deity is winking at me from the nets placed in the stream of time”