Stand still. The trees ahead are not lost
The title of the exhibition comes from a line in David Wagoner's poem “Lost,” which conveys a state of stillness as a remedy for a sense of lostness, uncertainty and not knowing. Wagoner uses the metaphor of someone who has wandered off the path and is lost in the woods. Lostness, the poem suggests, does not belong to the place itself, but emerges from what we ourselves bring, or fail to bring, to that place: “Wherever you are is called Here, / And you must treat it as a powerful stranger.”
From the Romantic era onwards, landscape has been perceived as both enchanting and indifferent — a powerful source of visionary imagery and serendipity, but at the same time a barely recognizable language that we cannot fully decipher or understand. Landscape imprints itself on us long before we are aware of its presence, quietly molding who we are. Through myth, memory, and craft tradition, the land becomes a vessel of collective meaning and the source of hidden knowledge, determining how we perceive ourselves.
The exhibition presents the works of three artists whose practices are close to stillness and silent epiphany that comes from being consumed by landscape and the visions that it evokes.
The artistic practice of Yelena Popova (born in the USSR, works in Nottingham, UK) suggests that landscape shapes identity in subtle, unconscious ways, expressed through shared narratives. By collecting soil, stone, and pigments from specific sites and incorporating them directly into her paintings, she allows the land itself to become both material and storyteller. Her work embeds geological, industrial, and personal histories, suggesting that place leaves lasting imprints beyond conscious awareness.
In search of what might be a more “meditative” and “contemplative” medium (the artist’s own words) Popova has recently shifted from painting to chunky knitted works that address the social and physical impacts of the unimaginable force brought by nuclear energy in the Anthropocene. Chunky knitting, for Popova, is valuable because of its duality — it is a medium where forces of construction and disintegration coexist. Working with macrame cords, she translates digitally generated compositions into knitted structures. Automated technology meets the tactile density and historical aura of knits as creations of contemplative, almost ritualistic practice, and mediators of spiritual experience.
Knitting can be seen as the shapeshifting of mysterious natural and supernatural powers into some sort of organized materiality. In works such as Stockpile (2024) and Spruce (after Sanquhar) (2022) Popova reactivates the ancient notion of the knitting as both a portal and a protective threshold between our reality and the unimaginable. Like ritual curtains that delineate sacred precincts, Popova’s works are zones of contemplation and encounter.
The artist combines complex geometry and symbolic images (a snake representing initiation and the cycle of rebirth) with references to energy and elemental forces. Symmetrical structures invite the viewer to pause and become immersed in an extended looking, a modern meditation that parallels the pre-modern weaving of cosmic or spiritual order into sacred cloth. The release of nuclear energy in the Anthropocene is regarded as a new source of unpredictable change and transformation: “The nuclear uncanny exists in the material effects, psychic tension and sensory confusion produced by [ ] radioactive materials” (Joseph Masco, The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico, Princeton University Press, 2006).
Ustina Yakovleva (born in Moscow, 1987, lives and works in Bali) engages with landscape as an interior condition shaped by time, ritual, and inherited memory rather than as a visible or tangible terrain. In her work slow, repetitive, and devotional processes echo ancestral acts of making and the rhythms of lived experience. Cultural memory, myth, and tradition are not illustrated but absorbed, giving rise to forms that seem to emerge organically, as if grown from within. Yakovleva articulates a language of place that operates below consciousness, where identity is shaped through presence, continuity, and gesture.
Untitled explores how the singularity of a landscape presents itself to the viewer as a serendipity, a distinctive amalgamation of factors that somehow encapsulates the totality of experience. The scene of a winter forest, branches against the sky and unadulterated earth, becomes an extension of inner states, a psychic experience rather than an objective view.
Unlike a conventional landscape that orients the viewer with horizon and depth, the textured surface of Untitled disrupts normal modes of looking. Beads catch light unpredictably, threads suggest lines without drawing clear forms, creating a haptic visuality, an aesthetic of feeling rather than seeing, demanding close, slow attention rather than quick recognition. Yakovleva builds imagery through beadwork and thread without preparatory sketches, so the act of making the work becomes an experience of slowness and stillness.
Objects in Yakovleva’s series Mosses and Mollusks refer to so-called pseudomorphs—fragments of organic matter that have transformed to a mineralized state through steady and slow chemical interaction with other compounds. As the artist says, Mollusks (2023 - 2025) might be perceived as a life form per se. The process of their creation resembles the process of evolution in the organic world: periods of stillness are the necessary condition of growth and transformation.
Mika Plutitskaya (born in 1983 in Moscow, lives and works in Leipzig, Germany) addresses a different, yet conceptually adjacent, terrain: the landscape of late Soviet childhood as it exists in memory, dreams, and the visual imprints of mass culture. Referencing her childhood in the final decade of the USSR, the artist repeatedly returns to the gap between lived experience and its ideological representation in Soviet films and cultural production. Her paintings function as sites of suspension, moments of “standing still” within a dense thicket of images inherited from a highly constructed visual regime.
Plutitskaya's artistic approach conceptualizes memory as a non-linear and unstable environment, drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the crystal-image: memory, perception, and imagination circulate endlessly, without resolving into a single, authoritative narrative. The resulting images are neither documentary nor purely fictional, but operate as mnemonic landscapes—spaces where time folds in on itself and where boundaries between the real and the imagined are dissolved.
The series Forest Deer (2019) exemplifies this approach. In Plutitskaya’s reinterpretation, fragments of late-Soviet architecture, animation (the 1972 Soviet film, Oh, That Nastya!), found photographs (the image of the child with a deer in Guests was taken by the artist from a Soviet-era photograph found in the rubble of a demolished building), and ruined modernist structures (Moscow’s largest social sciences library, destroyed by fire) appear as dislocated elements in a dreamlike pictorial space.
In Beasts (2018), the landscape is not a stable setting but a psychic field, from which suppressed emotions, fears, and ambivalences emerge. The idyllic imagery traditionally associated with Soviet childhood is stealthily undermined by an atmosphere of unease and multiplicity, as an oneiric image captured by the artist in its static form. This mirrors the idea of stillness as a moment when hidden structures and submerged meanings begin to surface. The serial approach resists linear storytelling but invites prolonged looking and associative drifting. Plutitskaya’s work proposes memory itself as a landscape that is powerful, estranging, and impossible to fully recall. Forest Deer reintroduces into cultural memory what late-Soviet ideology sought to exclude—ambiguity, fear, multiplicity, and the unsettling underside of innocence—revealing them as essential components of both personal and collective histories.
Curated by Alesya Veremyeva
