Circles on the asphalt

solo show by Daria Krotova

Winzavod Contemporary Art Center, entrance Н8

22.04 — 30.05.2025

On April 22, the a—s—t—r—a contemporary art gallery hosted the opening of Daria Krotova’s solo exhibition “Circles on the Asphalt”. The exhibition is dedicated to urban space as a unique structure subject to destruction, self-destruction and museumification.

The exhibition features works produced in the workshops of the Svody Art Production Center of the GES-2 Culture Center.

"On a Certain Recollection of Memory"

Text by Karina Karaeva, independent curator, PhD in Art History, art critic

Everything around us is driven by feelings, the past will not be repeated.

The familiar emerges in consciousness somewhat different, changed, and evokes correspondingly changed ideas instead of those that accompanied it. Here the dream begins. We feel changed images, and we see corresponding to these images - feelings from the old arsenal that match them: columns on iron beams, the burning eyes of owls, the swinging heads of athletes - whatever pleases whoever, finally.

Pavel Zaltsman. Dream. From the diaries

The city space is a unique structure, but subject to destruction, self-destruction, and museification. Memory freezes in the city and makes itself known in various ways, placing accents, commas, and interjections in recollections. Like dust that gets into your eyes after a rare truck in the city, it immediately excites memories associated with a clearing and a transparent, raised forest fog, frozen between the fir trees in the gap of sunny columns. The city is mobile not only in its architecture, but also in the geometry of random objects that undoubtedly carry a decorative function associated with how, for example, new standards of living are demonstrated - in no city in the world, except, it seems, Moscow, are there any known animalistic sculptures made from truck tires. These elegant city garden (at every garden at the entrance) objects are almost animated characters. They are like corrugated flowers, which were necessary attributes of any May Day demonstration during the USSR. They were specially prepared, uniting the whole family, and, by the way, also determined the social affiliation of the participant in the city processions - some had the opportunity to make whole bouquets of paper. The corrugated, as if pleated flower, was usually of a special color - either purple or pink, that is, always - halftone. It did not argue with the urban space, but only reverently supported the palette of houses and buildings. It seemed to stylize the decoration of the city, the typographic accent of the "Milk" signs, as if echoing the muffled, quiet space. A corrugated object, an accordion, a pleated one, in the era of total industrialization is supported by a corrugated pipe, the world in reverse. In the film "Literature Lesson" of 1968, the hero finds himself in an inverted urban space. At the very beginning of the film, a boy walks past new buildings and turns his head upside down for a second to look at what is happening upside down. After this, the narrative turns into a phantasmagoria through the reflection in the window of a large department store, through the hoses scattered around the city. These urban growths are the arteries of space. Without glass, accidentally or deliberately left in the arches between the houses, dust, pipes sticking out of the asphalt, sometimes absurd buildings, "scaffolding", the city loses its memory. The first association that comes to mind when you see a corrugated pipe is an artery, a vein, but in the space of the city’s memory it conveys an abandoned part of a house – like a discarded brick (the corrugated pipe is almost intentionally the same color as the foundation of the house, or liquefied blood, it has lost its brightness and cannot compete with, for example, the multi-colored sawdust that covers winter lawns, screaming with its bright unnatural color; perhaps the corrugated pipe is that inconspicuous abandoned object that still reminds us of the past, including its seemingly compressed greeting to the Shukhov tower – indeed, if you imagine a transparent geometric tower in a flattened form, it could well turn into a corrugated pipe), forgotten for a while by the builder in order to slightly disrupt the ideal urban landscape. They resemble both the bright spots in Cecily Brown's paintings and the anthropomorphic objects of Jim Hodges, spreading in the city, hidden in the ground, conflicting and entering into dialogue with the grass, flowers and dust, covered with urban dew and becoming invisible, transparent, like Luc Tuymans' flowers. Dasha Krotova is both a poet of urban spaces and a sensitive researcher of architectural obstacles. She suggests looking not at the new high-rises and futuristic ensembles, but turning our gaze downwards. Once, walking in Moscow, or rather rushing, I lowered my eyes for a minute to the asphalt and found a small golden spider. It is difficult to imagine this insect in the city, but its crushed state (literal and metaphorical) became a kind of allegory for the lost web of the city. Now you can go almost anywhere in the city, the posters "Don't Lean" have lost their relevance, but the city itself seems to have said goodbye to the past. The completely unnoticeable remains of time, mimicking in the present, changed and rather loud, remain a rare reminder of another quiet era. Krotova tries to say this as Dziga Vertov, turning the arteries of the city into a pulsating montage:

Were the wheels still spinning with a full ringing sound?

When the violin screamed into pieces

Cities, like ballerinas, on the tips of fingers.

Hearts and watches are afraid to tick,

Ten fingers stretched out

Lightning.

Stop! Ugly creature - end of the flight

The screen is filled with a wheel and a neck

In a rectangle, the diagonal

- a rail

The natural in the objects made of corrugated pipe is hidden in Krotova's claim to create a new nature. It seems that only in Moscow, whose fog is often replaced by pouring rain, a wet moment stops the movement in the city, flooding it to such an extent that streams beat out of the grates, forcing earthworms to crawl out onto the asphalt. Krotova's objects remind us of these small snakes of the urban space, whispering about the transience of life, exciting children's and adolescent dreams of trips to the dacha, and even in a sense frightening with their vulnerability. The corrugated pipe is an earthworm, mummified in its agony, and part of a rail, and the disappeared wires of a tram. The corrugated pipe reflects unthinkable geometric formulas sagging between the sky and the city in the form of stretched wires. However, Krotova refuses to create an ensemble, she insists on the solitude of the object. Uprooted from the urban space, without interaction with it, it turns into a spoiled amalgam, where the spots are a zero object, lost in time. In essence, the corrugated pipe is created as a camouflage, it is invented to hide, but at the same time its function is colossal, it is visually burdened, and Krotova enhances this visual advantage, but only with a color accent - it seems to add a tone to the "brickiness" of the pipe, but its exclusion from the urban landscape not only follows a simple method of movement, but rather enriches the geometry of space; this object turns into a flexible, mobile memory. It is a blood vessel internal and an external tube that provides breathing. It is a demonstration of the lost color of old houses, carrying only internal memory, externally transformed into a simulacrum, with replaced doors, windows, and lost tiles. It beats out the rhythm of the memory of nature, embodied in a new material, it is a remnant of a heavenly staircase, forgotten in the city, like a piece of glass accidentally found in the lawn, which once served as a frame and amalgam of a “secret” of flowers - the flowers have sprouted or finally turned into an urban herbarium, and the reflection remains. Dig in the ground, return to it - Krotovaya's call, in which there is no pathos of demonstration slogans, or agitation for participation in clean-up days, but the sadness that the city is losing its dusty charm is hidden. However, the journey continues, it is hidden in morning walks, when the city is not yet filled with industrial wind, but conceals a looped smell of dew. Looped, since in essence this feeling is nonsense, unimaginable - it is almost impossible to find dew in the urban space, but it pulsates in the head like the memory of the village, like the taste of milk that suddenly appeared in the mouth. Looped images signs are embodied in silk-screen printing. These prints, similar to Robert Smithson's images, only partially bear the burden of minimalism. They surprisingly return to the state of the mirror - insofar as they are a reflection, firstly, of non-existent, or rather rare images in the city, secondly, the figure of the broken circle inevitably bears the burden of a dissected zero, that is, it signals the loss of time, and thirdly, it opens an almost cosmic narrative - that this circle, if not the outline of a satellite. However, Krotova not only enhances the interactive aspect, but also translates the image into a sign, the circle almost disappears, dissolves in the palette, becomes domesticated, strives to be unnoticed or provokes scrutiny. Flanking in the city again invites you to lower your gaze, perhaps to see the reflection of the sun, or the spectrum of its rays, perhaps to continue the impression of "what is seen below", to become a witness to an abstract pulse diagram. These blurred dotted lines – commas, dashes, exclamations, interjections – are like the speech of an urban creature. They came from the images of Ghada Amer or the graphics of Tracey Emin, but are devoid of eroticism, they are the essence of poetry, again quiet, spoken almost in a whisper. A closed or open structure, not devoid of the imaginary, recalls both the mathematical objects of Hilma af Klint and the drawings of On Kawara, but remains a hint of a new language of the urban alphabet, which is built when the viewer/reader looks at their feet, trying to find the reflection of the sun's rays on the asphalt. This sign-ness is an unimaginable poetry of squiggles and new interjections, a journey into the unconscious. Krotova's drawings-signs are made in an almost disappearing, shimmering manner of writing, they are weightless like the metaphysics of air, transparent and translucent almost like a cinematic film. Film of memory. Again about memory – Krotova's project with gloves. Abandoned, forgotten, discarded, imprinted in the topographic atlas of the city, these objects turn into animated sculptures. The durability of these sculptures is volumetric in the sense that the artist comes up with names or titles for them, poeticizes them. A new system of communication with discarded objects, the linguistic construction repeats the outline of the object - the text turns out to be less expressive than the form - the recognition system is hidden in the lyrical meaning: "Life has battered". Battered, confused, forgotten being, almost as in the objects of Cosima von Bonin, who works with the dissection of memory. However, Krotova rather builds its geometry, the constant downward gaze is in fact a figurative, metaphorical peering into oneself, into fear, ecstasy, enchantment, into the hidden memory, into the flesh of consciousness of the rhetorical imagination. Now the representation of memory completes its journey through the poetry of loss.