MAYANA NASYBULLOVA

"Many years have passed, and it’s as if we’ve understood nothing about the essence of evil," these words are found in Jean-Pierre Dupuy’s book "Small Metaphysics of the Tsunami," dedicated to the study of catastrophes in the Modern era. In his work, he theoretically comprehends the phenomenon of catastrophe as one of the implicit phenomena of modernity, shaping its current face. This theme is addressed by Mayana Nasybullova’s project "Everything is terrible," in which she contemplates its overarching image that undermines the global history of civilization and, on the other hand, is linked to the texture of a specific personal trauma. Corporeality, breakthroughs, and flaws of the human body, its dysfunctionality and helplessness, organize the key aesthetic motifs of the exposition, encapsulating a kind of rhetorical response to the artistic quests of Vadim Sidur.

Also reinterpreting the plasticity of modernism in her work, with its explorations of primitive forms and searches for the limits of artistic expression, she turns to its central motifs — his experiences in war, violence, and trauma, reading it through the lens of contemporary realities. Thus, it most openly manifests in the image of a disabled person surrounded by a group of sculptures of enraged women — simultaneously serving as a metaphor for all the oppressed: women who have experienced violence and war, soldier’s mothers, widows, and daughters. A scream — and/or its impossibility — powerless silence, form a rhetorical figure that organizes the meaning of this part of the narrative. The "human-likeness" of Mayana Nasybullova’s sculptural figures — their formal proximity to recognizable images, yet distorted by a "zombie" essence — is revealed here in all its vulnerability. Within it is suggested a protest against any anti-humanism.

This texture of a "borderline situation," to use Karl Jaspers' term, analyzing moments of deep upheaval, traumatic events, testimonies of tragedy, is embodied in the desolation of the installation space of another room. In the wall painting, a drawing reconstructed from what Nasybullina encountered in Bukhara — in a Uzbek roma village. According to local residents, an escaped prisoner they sheltered depicted this heavenly landscape on the wall — in the most horrifying conditions, where one could barely find a blanket and water; the author of the painting depicted his vision of a happy and ideal world.

By uniting various sculptural elements in the space of a unified — syncopated and contrasting — narrative, Nasybullova points out the problematic nature of any representation of traumatic experience. Truly deep upheaval cannot be comprehended and formalized — it cannot be adapted in any way other than through testimony — and the acknowledgment of the inconceivability of ordinary words and actions when confronted with a certain pivotal moment — on a broad historical scale or in a private biography. This situation of interrupting the comprehensible reality becomes a pivotal motif of the project, in which a turning point is materially embodied — the transformation of the unimaginable into the admissible, the unreal into the factual, the impossible into the tangible and visible.