Evgeny Antufiev: Twelve, wood, dolphin...

The Siberian artist's dolls are the spiritual guides of an unsettling exhibition at Collezione Maramotti, making up a chronology of matter drawn from countless images: fairy-tale, science-fiction, historic and mythical.

In Neill Blomkamp's District 9 — a film that received four Oscar nominations in 2010 — there is a curious species, the "non-humans”, extra-terrestrials who have landed in Johannesburg and are subjected to abuse by humans. These "non-humans" are represented by monsters that look like giant prawns, with mouths made from dangling threads the size of a finger, which quiver like tentacles on the transfigured face. It is a visual detail that comes to mind when, having put on the white paper shoe protectors, I cross the threshold into the unsettling world of Evgeny Antufiev.

His dolls, spiritual guides of the current exhibition at the Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia, are not exactly monsters but whitish, anthropomorphic figures, resulting from an assemblage of cloth and organic materials, that make up a chronology of matter drawn from countless images: fairy-tale, science-fiction, historic and mythical. The doll is a double-edged sword: nightmare or dream, in a child’s cradle, in the secret hideaway of a serial killer or in the alcove of a Siberian shaman. Antufiev hails from that same region — Siberia — and it is not an easy task to liberate oneself from the intensity that fills the history of this vast land.

"Evgeny Antufiev. Twelve, wood, dolphin, knife, bowl, mask, crystal, bones and marble – fusion. Exploring materials" installation view at Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy

Antufiev grwew up on the border with Mongolia, amid pine forests and frozen lakes, communities of shamans and nomadic shepherds. He still spends time in the region of Tuva as well as the Russian capital. In his personal atlas of emotive geographies and obsessions, Antufiev unites the experience of the hand-worked with that of a reckless ethnographer, alchemist, or dolphin enthusiast. Twelve, wood, dolphin, knife, bowl, mask, crystal, bones and marble – fusion. Exploring materials, the exhibition's title, is an instrument that the artist concedes himself as the only form of orientation, a game of Scrabble that suggests multiple combinations.

Knife is at the centre of this backwards journey that leads us from the work to the process that generated it. Made with iron meteorite, this object embodies the principle of omnipotence. Its blade, sharp and fine, penetrates impossible fissures and establishes in a single gesture, death or rebirth. It is what enables Antufiev to pierce reality with a certain eroticism, to the point of touching on every element of matter and confounding all acquired certainties. The mirror image is that of the dolphin. A docile, appealing animal, it plunges with precision into the salty water and slices it with regular movements that can also be reproduced by a simple hand movement. Pluff! So this is why they return, in the form of small naked photographs, to immortalise the experience in a dolphinarium or as fetish objects with an unknown history.

The exhibition is a scientific experiment, a potion that has not yet revealed its magical powers. One moves through it like a detective in search of a clue that will not disappoint, to validate theories that justify certain intuitions. In this manic labyrinth, anything goes, even doubt in believing that what you see is true: because if knife and dolphin are the two words that best translate the cosmogony of this exhibition, fake is the missing adjective to close the magic circle. Marble that is not marble, sand that is not sand, wood that is not wood. Every object, constructed or salvaged, sets linear interpretations off course.

Marble is so attractive, with its pallor. You only need to trace a greyish vein with a finger to feel the pulse. Inside the Tuva sanatorium one can find a cube of white marble: once upon a time it supported the bust of Lenin. Today Lenin is gone: what remains is a stone base, the fusion of a human sentiment with matter. The transformation of matter is strongly linked tp the notion of the hereafter, funeral rites, the possibility of continuing one’s life in another form. Rebirth as a principle of reconstruction of physical and spiritual integrity.

In the exhibition catalogue, a curious dialogue between Antufiev and his mother Nadezhda is reproduced. Made up by the artist for this occasion, here two lines of reasoning on immortality cross personal experiences. "A while ago, in an article, I stumbled across a beautiful description of the pilgrimages of the soul after death for the Ket people," states Antufiev at a certain point. "I always believed in these things when I was little, I left my hair everywhere because I thought that after death I could appear in the places that I had marked in this way. In fact when I was taken to Italy as a child, I hid some hair there. In the hotels and parks." Martina Angelotti (@martinanji)

Through 21 July 2013

Evgeny Antufiev: Twelve, wood, dolphin, knife, bowl, mask, crystal, bones and marble – fusion. Exploring materials

Collezione Maramotti

Via Fratelli Cervi 66, Reggio Emilia

Evgeny Antufiev: Twelve, wood, dolphin...

The Siberian artist's dolls are the spiritual guides of an unsettling exhibition at Collezione Maramotti, making up a chronology of matter drawn from countless images: fairy-tale, science-fiction, historic and mythical.

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