Sasha Zaitseva (*1994 Donetsk, UA)
Black Shards, site-specific commission for the EPO, 2023
As a multidisciplinary artist, Sasha Zaitseva explores the boundaries and edges of cultural identity. At the latest, this becomes clear when you see yourself reflected in the shiny surfaces of Zaitseva's explosive installation. Despite its elements pointing directly at you and their rather menacing, metallic look, the artwork does not deny you the space to regain your composure from any feelings of disorientation. On the contrary, Black Shards invites you to participate in its elaboration, to reconstruct a lost totality by combining and recombining its reflective fragments.
Given Zaitseva's Ukrainian-Russian heritage, her origins in a city near the border of the two countries and the geopolitical situation in and around Ukraine, a major focus of her oeuvre is on the cultural trauma of war. As a dynamic vision, Black Shards recalls painful experience, but at the same time, the work is a hopeful act of faith in anticipation of a more peaceful future. The card covered in glossy paper, of which each shard is made, cannot cause any immediate harm: reconciliation remains within reach.
Moreover, by entering into dialogue with a wide range of customs, artistic traditions and current affairs, Zaitseva actively conjures the prospect of a new reality. Elsewhere, she has done so with brilliantly coloured fabrics, embroidery and masks, as well as more sombre, reductionist paintings. As for the dialogue suggested in Black Shards, think for example of Black Square (1915), a famous oil painting by Russian avant-garde artist Kazimir Malevich (1879-1935) depicting a black square on white linen. When first exhibited, it appeared just below the ceiling, hung across the “icon corner,” where traditionally a Russian Orthodox icon could be found in the homes of believers. At the same time as recalling this seminal early work of abstraction by bursting out of the corner of our studio, Zaitseva’s installation echoes a watchword of Surrealism penned by the writer André Breton in 1937 and repeatedly used to convey the idea of an aesthetic shock: explosante-fixe, which literally translates as “fixed-explosive.” Yet alongside the video of Zaitseva preparing her artwork on-site in September 2023, the installation is recomposed with every new visitor.