The project explores the dialectics of fragment and wholeness. We live in an era of hyperfragmentation—of identity, time, information, and experience. Yet, we instinctively strive for assembly, synthesis, and the search for connections. The exhibition asks: what is a «part» without the context of a «whole»? And how does the process occur when a set of heterogeneous parts becomes a new, autonomous whole?
«Shards» Ksenia Timofeeva
The authors of the exhibition project are students from last year’s «Visual Arts» course. The project itself originated from work creating a zine after participating in a media tour of the exhibition «Square and Space: From Malevich to HES-2» at the GES-2 cultural center. This exhibition focused on the influence of Kazimir Malevich’s creativity on 20th-century art. The exhibition included works by crucial artists of the century: from Gerhard Richter’s metaphysical «Candle» and Pablo Picasso’s Cubist «Portrait of Ambroise Vollard» to pieces by Anselm Kiefer and Jean-Michel Basquiat.
«Twilight» by Agatha Kopelovich
The students' task was to reimagine the material they encountered at the exhibition. Most of their collages incorporate a «part of the whole» of that project. For instance, Tagiyev Ilchin used fragments of the works displayed in the halls of the GES-2 building to fill a blueprint drawing in one of his pieces. This resulted in a navigational map that appears as a single canvas.
Daniel Zotov’s original works, «Synthesis 1» and «Synthesis 2, ” are part of a project where he works with photographic film brought back from a trip to Japan. The canvases mix two photographs, transforming them into a glitch or a portal to another reality.
«Parts of a Whole» is an exhibition project that resembles a construction kit, where certain elements remain dynamic—persisting through time and space—like living matter used to assemble new meanings, worlds, and perspectives.
