There will be signs

There will be signs — part of a phrase that went viral on social media. ‘If I win the lottery, I won't tell anyone. But there will be signs’, — says the whole phrase. Signs are units of communication, barely noticeable deviations from the usual routine, which become the evidence of large-scale changes: something has already happened, only was left unattended. Only the consequences of an invisible phenomenon make it possible to reconstruct it. For the participants of There will be signs, this invisible but omnipresent phenomenon lies in the unknowable about other non-human beings. Their presence is undeniable, but the very fact of their discovery becomes a delimiting moment: as long as we don't talk about nature, don't see it, don't specifically go out to look for it, it seems to exist everywhere. As soon as we give it a name — we turn it into a scenery, again leaving some part of it in the space of the undetectable and beyond control. Only small clues appear on the surface: traces of unknown creatures and unexplained occurrence that the artists record. Katya Antoshkina pushes the boundaries of the pictorial plane to a full-fledged stage entourage, immersing the viewer in the space of transcendental motifs. In response to the detached contemplation, Katya Vlasova draws the boundary with the ‘undisclosed’ by means of stereophotography — a close look at the moving image only increases doubts as to whether one can trust one's own eyes. The traces of the presence of the unidentified are intensified by the sound accompaniment worked on by Maria Abdullaeva and Vera Tarasova — the artists assemble the space of the inaccessible using the field recordings, where each familiar detail takes the viewer deeper into the unknown. Organized by másla lissé and SPHERE Contemporary Art Foundation Special thanks to Sergey Guskov and Slava Nesterov