Tides
Hagit Damri-Nave, 2010
In her new exhibition “Tide” Natalia Zourabova is showing colorful acrylic works designed as frozen frames from security or surveillance films. In the main space she hangs large scale works containing scenes from her everyday family life. And in an internal niche pieces of puzzle are scattered, which, if put together, create a sequence that tells a story of a family visit to the beach during which a plane crashes into the ocean.
The unique perspective through which Zourabova chooses to design her works turns the act of looking at them into an ambivalent and uneasy experience. She allows us to look at her, at her family members and at other people as we look at ordinary objects, and equates human routines to boring surveillance films not worth watching. But she also infuses the space with tension relating to the fact that when we do look at these kinds of images, it is usually because something extraordinary was recorded on them. This sensational potential concealed in her works maintains a sense that we are watching an exposition to a drama that is about to happen.
But the tense anticipation is proven to be unjustified. The drama is not occurring, and the images are not revealing scandalous events or dark secrets, only banal everyday moments: Zourabova and her husband in their living room, Zourabova and her husband sleeping, Zourabova, her husband and their daughter in the park, the three family members watching television, a little girl peeing in the sand, a boy playing in the urine-stained sand, and so on… Even the airplane that crashes into the ocean surrenders to the tide regime, and fails to disrupt the unobtrusive poetic rhythm of the routine.
The choice to correspond the artist’s personal routine (through the family scenes), with the cosmic routine (through the seaside landscapes) and the political routine (through the iconic image of the crushing airplane/airplanes) consolidates a Saying that echoes the ancient concept of ‘Eternal Return’. According to this concept “there is noting new under the sun,” and people, as other components of the universe, are like marionettes that move according to a written script. Through the lens of this perspective, the crushing airplane, births of babies, burials of mothers, deserted children and beaches are parts of an uncontrollable circular sequence of events. And the heroic, tragic, or ordinary meanings usually attached to them are no more than desperate human attempts to attribute purpose or meaning to their existence.
Zourabova follows the mechanisms that produce and reproduce meanings in the post- industrial era, and marks the central role played by visual culture and the art in this respect. Through the practices of referring to familiar codes, like the voyeuristic point of view of a reality show, a paparazzi or a surveillance camera, the plastic colorfulness typical for advertising, and the concept of I- movies and documentary, she activates the “right” voyeuristic mechanism. The viewer sits back in a passive yet tense manner and prepares to peep at the scandalous, perverted or ordinary life of the other, probably in order to accept the normal nature of his or her own life.
But the normality that Zourabova reveals is far from being reassuring. She uses the familiar codes as promises only in order to break them, and by that emphasizes the simulacric, potential and promise -like nature of human reality. Thus, in the puzzle, the beautiful seashore scenery with little white boats and seagulls is not serene. Children are childhood-free: no one is looking after them, and instead of joy and innocence they invoke an atmosphere of threatening sexuality. The mother-daughter activity lacks warmth or intimacy and at times looks like a kidnapping: the daughter buries her mother in the sand, and at the end of the visit the mother shoves the little girl into the car. Even the airplane crush is not confirmed as an ‘event’ or a tragic spectacle. Instead it looks like a collection of grey stains that disappear under the cover of darkness in a big black hole. The family images are breaking all their ‘promises’ too: the family members are not playing “house,” and where family was supposed to be, we find only voids, loneliness, detachment and alienation. The domestic space is sterile and static, family members are not interacting – their faces are not turned one toward the other, and their bodies reflect discomfort. One of the images describes a family visit to the park. In it we see a little girl crying but her father and mother are ignoring or not hearing her voice. The father is bending down and the mother is sealing her ears. The atmosphere that accumulates in the gallery is one of autism and detachment. People, adults as well as children, exist in deserted places, with no context or language, in places of absences.
The absence theme keeps appearing on different levels of the exhibition: it is implied in empty seats, through the lacking of familiar motherly or parental icons (there is no kitchen or other evidence of nourishing or care), and via the fact that in most of the images it is hard to identify the men, the women and the connection between the two adults and the child. Another layer of absence is added by the repetitive nature of the exhibition (all the works have the same format, the same colors; all of them describe the same characters doing similar things). The compulsive tone signifies the constant need to verify the domestic reality and the chronic failure to give meaning or certainty to the ‘family’.
It seems that Zourabova’s reality-show, paparazzi or maybe surveillance project does not fulfill its familiar purposes: instead of giving validation or reassurance to human reality, it exposes reality as a concealing mechanism of the void. These things become more meaningful when we take into consideration the artist’s working process. According to Zourabova, all the works are born from a real memory. The memory becomes a visual scene that the artist draws on the computer, using graphic design software. Then she copies the digital drawing onto a big canvas, using a pencil. She covers the pencil outlines with cellotape and fills the spaces between the cellotape lines with acrylic colors. “…In spite of the big size of my works, I work in a small studio. I don’t need the perspective because I color the different parts of the image one at a time. Only at the end of the process I walk away from the canvas and get the complete picture…”
Zourabova creates hybrids. She melts the human with the digital and produces unsolvable entanglements of real and virtual. The machine imitates the memory, which has a complex connection with its origin. Then the artist imitates the imitation produced by the machine. Through the inseparable mixture of the human and the digital, the real and the virtual, Zourabova reduces the sensual, emotional and existential meanings that are “vivid” in family memories (or in iconic scenes) to a series of electric pulses. This act erases the private, real or unique contents that allegedly build the memory, leaving only the absences and voids that those “contents” were meant to fill or hide. The family images that she manages to produce and hang on the gallery walls, that at first arouse a sense of familiarity of even déjà vu come to operate as empty signs, as a kind of Rorschach blots that invoke a universal identification process, in which every view can identify itself. In Zourabova’s work, the distinction between the real and the virtual, my reality and the reality of others is blurred. All kind of realities are being reduced into a socially constructed sphere decoded collectively by the arbitrary social arrangements and institutions like family or childhood, which constantly fail to cover the void. What began as a familiar invitation to peep into the reality of others ends with the disturbing insight that inside or outside there is noting to peep at.
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