Description:
The very title of Diana Kapizova’s new project sets an escapist tone. The desire to hide often emerges from a conflict between personal perceptions and external reality. In this work, Kapizova turns to the concept of romantic duality, contrasting the real world with one of imagination.
Riding a winged Pegasus-train, the heroine arrives in her hometown of Pervouralsk — the matrix of Kapizova’s visual language and a key source of her artistic identity. The atmosphere of the work emerges from two intertwined elements: childhood memories of an industrial city and the fantastical transformation of its factories into a magical landscape, where the heroine searches for happiness and a lost paradise. The journey unfolds as a visual narrative, shaped by introspective self-analysis through the phenomenology of childhood.
Drawing on the structure of Vladimir Propp’s folklore theory — crossings, magical helpers and gifts, forests, and animals — Kapizova leads us into her own fairy-tale realm. The industrial sfumato of massive metallurgical plants transforms them into mystical castles reminiscent of Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings. The Ural Mountains are reimagined as secret labyrinths, hidden passages within Pavel Bazhov’s “Malachite Casket.”
Kapizova recounts the story of her childhood city with disarming tenderness. She does not distance herself from it, nor does she portray it as a site of social or ecological catastrophe. Instead, she aligns herself with the community — factory workers, hopeful migrants, all those who sought a better life in the Urals. A quiet melancholy underpins the fairy-tale atmosphere, as the heroine’s journey becomes a wandering among the ruins of Soviet dreams. The once-ambitious modernist utopias, suffused with faith in a brighter future, now barely linger, dissolving into a pink and green mist.
The apotheosis of the journey is the dematerialization of a monument — and with it, the disappearance of the historical narratives it embodied. The shadow under which the heroine seeks refuge is not a simple nostalgia for childhood; it is the shadow of history itself, the imprint of a disillusioned past.
Yet hope persists. The heroine carries a talisman — a stone gifted by the Mistress of the Copper Mountain — a key to the future. As she plants it into the ground, a miraculous transformation begins. The vision of a new world emerges in the form of an imaginative architectural structure — part-factory, part-organ — evocative of the visionary designs of Herzog & de Meuron.
Over this reborn world floats the melody of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” from The Wizard of Oz. Filled with melancholy for an unattainable ideal, the song becomes an anthem of hope. The rising rainbow symbolizes a longing for a better world — a dream both utopian and poignantly real. The past has ended, and the future is yet to begin.
— Svetlana Taylor, Independent exhibition curator and lecturer
