So many years have passed, and you haven't changed a bit...

Sasha Lemish’s project is a total installation with the poetic title: “So many years have passed, and you haven't changed a bit, you're still beautiful, I'm even jealous) I hope you haven't forgotten about me.” This generic comment, which bots leave under the posts in Russian-speaking segment of Instagram, leaves a strange, sentimental aftertaste. It seems to intertwine unfulfilled hopes, a faint bitterness of loss, inexplicable nostalgia for bygone eras, and people faded from memory. “I wish I could vanish from this world full of sorrow and suffering: slip on my wings, open the window, and fly away into the boundless cosmos,” muses the protagonist of this exhibition, inspired by the rift between generations — starkly different yet ensnared in similar traps. From icons of 1980s Soviet nonconformist art, he borrows a longing for freedom and fantasies of a global world; from the 2010s generation, the loss of any hope to find one’s place in the “capitalist project.” Operating at this fracture, the artist constructs a composite image of the “superfluous man” — blending the aesthetics of sad boys, typified by cloud rapper Yung Lean, and characters from Ilya Kabakov’s albums, who dream of escaping this gray totalitarian world to craft their own realms in bedrooms or closets.