Dance artist is Alyona Ageeva

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The motif of flight and relocation between worlds through tunnels, pipes, or wells is familiar both to myth and fairy tale traditions. Yet here, the ability to fly is presented in a different light — more as a disguised play with space, where exit and entrance become almost indistinguishable. The psychological and physical sensations of floating, flying, and weightlessness are intimately tied to the notion of happiness and the concept of love — a culmination embodied in Endless Shell Echo.

Through recognizable symbolic elements, it becomes clear that the journey takes place deep within an underwater world, beginning at the threshold between the unconscious and the dream state, as suggested in the first scene. At each stop along the route stands a magical portal — a kind of checkpoint — and the artist, assuming the guise of various heroines, appears inside, beside, or near these thresholds, poetically “casting spells” to metaphorically inform us where we have arrived and what lies ahead.

Overall, the work reproduces certain ritualistic patterns, most closely resembling initiation rites that evoke the psychological archetype of death and rebirth.

Diana Kapizova offers the viewer ample space for interpretation, aligning herself with a new generation of artists who are deeply peace-oriented and have consciously distanced themselves from traditional critical-artistic paradigms. Endless Shell Echo can be read as a myth of eternal return, a reenactment of the archetypal initiation order, a Platonic allegory of the cave and transcendence of bodily limitations — where desire generates images and images give rise to desire — or as the anguish of the prophet Jonah, “the waters compassed me about, even to the soul: the depth closed me round about, the weeds were wrapped about my head.”

Others might associate the experience with Stanislav Grof’s perinatal matrices, with the myth of Venus born from the sea foam bringing humanity the precious gift of love, or recall the poetic imagery of Mikhail Kuzmin.

Some might interpret the route as a retrospective journey through the bliss of prenatal life, or as a psychoanalytical model of narcissism.

Endless Shell Echo is Kapizova’s expedition into fantastical worlds. The structure of this alternate reality is composed of a sequence of fairy-tale scenes, each unfolding into the next, ultimately culminating in the heroine’s ascent and transition into the otherworld.

– Svetlana Taylor, Independent curator and lecturer

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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

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In this project, the viewer finds themselves on an island in the middle of Lake Baikal, a place within the Middle World. Here, they may encounter forest spirits, the Ezhin of Water, and the Thunderer. A deer, revered as a sacred intermediary between the human realm and the divine, serves as a guide to the Upper World. Meanwhile, at the heart of the landscape lies an ancient crevice filled with lava—falling into it leads to the Lower World.

This project was developed as part of a master’s thesis with the support of the “Technological Art” master’s program at NUST MISIS.

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The video takes its inspiration from the song “The Return of the Giant Hogweed”, released by the British rock group Genesis in 1971. The song warns of the apocalyptic spread of the poisonous plant Heracleum mantegazzianum (giant hogweed) after it was “captured” in the hills of the Russian Empire and brought to Britain by Victorian botanists. The lyrics of the songs are filled with ironic humor and describe an anthropomorphized plant that is on a mission to destroy the human race. The video “The Return of the Return of the Giant Hogweed” is an updated version of the story told in the Russian language, looking at the Cold War era half a century later from the viewpoint of the giant hogweed itself, telling the story of its fall.

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2-5. Alexandra Lerman, The Return of the Return of the Giant Hogweed

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• Video, 24 min
• Composer: Alex Havran
• Voice-over by Masha Dugina
• Hair styling by Gevorg Agamalyan
• Shot, edited and sound recorded by kykyvideo

Special thanks to Garage Museum Studios and Ivan Isaev and Irina Sopina

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• Camera, editing, sound: Elza Abdulkhakova, Rustam Nerustam
• Color correction: Rustam Nerustam
• Composer: Magulya Mezinova
• Titles: Victoria Kibe
• Special thanks: Elvira Abdulkhakova, Evgeniya Fomina

Created as a part of the laboratory of the New Dance Academy on Baikal

Curator: Siia Lonshakova

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In this work, I explore the body as a pliable material, something that can provoke disgust and be transformed, but that also has its own limits and boundaries. The main character in my story is a creature made of dough, uncomfortable in its own body. We live in a time where everything that happens to you is supposed to come with a sense of comfort. I find myself asking the question of happiness: is it possible after altering one’s physical form?

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Within the framework of our research, we created a map of the geomagnetic activity of this area of the National park. For the survey we used fluxgate magnetometers, which allow for non-penetrating measurement of the magnetic field. We used the results of this survey to create a three-dimensional map and made a mock-up of the Dancing Forest geomagnetic activity using a 3D printer. This mock-up and the distribution of the field by the heights of the survey shows how the magnetic field changes in this section of the park.

We also made portable devices that are attached to the trees of the Dancing Forest. They form a single intelligent system with an autonomous real-time data transmission module. This system has biopotential analyzers, various detectors and environmental sensors. Devices of this type can be used to measure the electrophysiology of trees, as well as to analyze the reaction of biological objects to the influence of geomagnetic fields. The information received from the sensors of the system is sent to the screen and its properties are determined by changes in the electrical activity of the trees and indicators of the Earth’s magnetic field. The Dancing Forest project is an interaction of data streams, which, in addition to the non-human entities themselves, also reflect the relations that exist between them.

Video documentary on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/762933402

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