The music stops. The guests are embarassed. Pause

****************************************** “For her exhibition ‘The music stops. The guests are embarrassed. Pause’ Lada Nakonechna reorganizes the gallery space into a kind of theatre setting, hides the general light under a ‘photoshop degree zero’ banner, puts on the floor metal objects altering their function and image, reproduces a camouflage costume and does not build distinct relationships between the objects. Exposed objects do not hide their weirdness. At first sight simple and clear, these objects disturb the viewer by their own uncertainty. They seem to unveil the hybridity of contemporaneity: hybrid thinking, hybrid wars, hybrid food, etc. Exposing these weird objects, Lada reveals the habitual disturbance that can be easily disregarded in the perceptual automatism of everyday life. Time has entered into a state of constant ‘out-of-jointness’. Human life has become a constant state of emergency. Do people have enough courage not only to notice it but also to stay with this feeling? Nevertheless, putting this state of emergency out of mind does not provide any chance to escape it. The objects exposed by Lada carry the traces of the operation of division the artist has performed. Having overcrowded the world with numerous inventions and technological miracles, human beings still have not found any clear and simple relation to reality and to themselves. People, armed with gadgets, do not feel less lost before ontological incertitude. What if one rips, tears, unstitches smooth and unruffled surfaces and spaces? What if one warps something unwarped? The revealed multiplicity of surfaces becomes visible, showing how much work is still to be done. But what kind of work should the artist do today? Artists have already rethought the function and essence of art; they have constantly been breaking down the boundaries between art and life, they have reconsidered the relationships between art and politics several times; art has lived through dematerialization, documentation and conceptualization. At last, art has become non-art and returned to being art again. Maybe uncertainty, weirdness and hybridity is what demands our attention again? Maybe it is high time to look more carefully at what is incomprehensible in conventional things and objects? What if this silent embarrassment around is exactly what humans need to notice? Having in mind the danger of utopianism of the ‘victory over the sun’, understanding the redundancy of mimetic reproduction, experiencing whimsicality and alertness of an awkward state of a human, Lada Nakonechna investigates and exposes the world’s state of unrest in a pause .

Mariana Matveichuk, 2016