This is big big big / This is small small small 

2021 

Artists: Katerina Sokolovskaya, Carla Chaim 

Curator: Anna Zavediy

Osnova gallery 

Recognizing, pointing, repeating — trying to bargain an anti-anxiety drug, local anesthesia. Nursery rhyme as a way to call things and their features by their proper names. We thought that we already exist in the post-pandemic time and are capable of making some clear conclusions about the new reality, but it seems that the situation is quite different. It is impossible to talk retrospectively about the world in economic, social, and biopolitical terms. The present is happening right now and changing in front of us. Therefore, the best we can do is to indicate the properties of the fragments of the present, thus avoiding the anxiety that they do not come together in a clear whole.

Katerina Sokolovskaya and Carla Chaim show how and where anxiety grows. Without a human being. As another object. The duo-project is based on the question of relationship between body and space; and broadly — between all real things. Different in their aesthetics, but close in ideology, artists reproduce the so-called “sensual objects”. They indicate places of the pre/post/extra- contact tension. According to Graham Harman, things never relate to each other directly but they can contact via sensual objects. We can imagine them as a third that appears between two real objects. But what if we remove the real objects and leave only the sensual ones? Something deliberately sharp, something deliberately huge, strange, torn off. Withdrawal of the bodies-things, we will have to stop in front of what is left and repeat: “this is big big big, and this is small small small”.

Like two Alices in Wonderland, the artists throw into the space terrifying bizarre toys: huge eyes, sharp icicles, spider eyelashes, a six-armed beetle and a message-cypher: handprints. But the essence of these things is not surreal. All these toys found themselves not in the imagination and not in the subconscious, but in the plane of the objective world, alongside with the walls and ceiling of the gallery, tables, chairs, and bodies of guests. Katya and Сarla create surfaces, bring sensual artefacts out of the rabbit holes. Fear can run away from us like a white rabbit, delight can grow above us like a big mushroom, and doubt can flood everything around with restless waters.