St()re #1: History Holes

Sergey Shabohin’s work St()re #1: History Holes, reminiscent of a glass display case filled with a multitude of objects, was produced in 2010 for the ArtBoom Tauron Festival in Cracow, and in 2013 was adapted for the Arsenal Gallery in Białystok residents’ exhibition in the framework of the “The Rise of Eastern Culture / Another Dimension” project. In Cracow, it was positioned in the Market Square, by the plinth of the sculpture Eros Bendato by Igor Mitoraj. A photograph of tourists beneath Mitoraj’s sculpture pasted on the wall of the showcase is a trace of this episode, as are, inside the case, the candles and flowers which had been placed by Shabohin’s work by the residents of Cracow in commemoration of, among others, the crash of the presidential plane near Smolensk.

The concept for the work is based on the artist’s reference to the resemblance between the two words: “store” and “history” in English. Among the objects filling the case are reproductions of artworks and prints (e.g. the painting by Giovanni Baglione St Sebastian Healed by an Angel, 1603; the map of Asia from the Theatrum orbis terrarum sive Atlas novus atlas by Willem Blaeu, 1635; one of Étienne-Louis Boullée’s designs for the Opéra au Carrousel in Paris from 1781), photographs of the crematorium oven and the main gate of the Birkenau concentration camp, an empty bottle with the label of a popular German liqueur, press cuttings, beads, and books, including Henryk Zieliński’s Historia Polski 1914–1939 (1983). The whole is unified by the motif of the mandorla, the halo surrounding the figure of Jesus or the Virgin Mary, but also an abyss associated with the vagina. Its almond shape is seen in the Utroba cave in Bulgaria, an ancient fertility cult site. In Shabohin’s work, the mandorla occupies a symbolic place: the studio he runs is named after it (Gray Mandorla Studio).

By means of objects and images, Shabohin constructs a narrative relating to the past. Yet this is not a linear story of facts, and the relationships between the props are not obvious. The manifold threads form a web full of rifts, silences, failures to mention and acts of denial. Visions of the future are intertwined with martyrdom and the memory of genocide; reflections on consumerism and the commercialisation of space and history – with the motif of history being written before our eyes. A scholarly monograph by no means brings order to the chaos of things; it is only an element of an incomplete mosaic. Yet what interests Shabohin most in this scattering of fragments is the absence, the broken continuity and all that is hidden in the unknown, of which the emptiness of the mandorla is a visual substitute.

Izabela Kopania

translated from Polish by Klaudyna Michałowicz