01.05.2020 – 2nd day after the COVID quarantine ends
In early summer 2019, Mark Chehodaiev made his first intervention into the space of The Naked Room. Within the graduate show of Contemporary Art course of Kyiv Academy of Media Arts he made a 10x10-cm cutout of the wall in his apartment and installed it into the gallery wall. With this gesture he merged the artwork and its background into one piece. Moreover, he created an inversion—where an artwork takes the place of a wall, hardly standing out, while still keeping its autonomy. And the wall, in turn, becomes an artwork in itself.
During the quarantine period the gallery space temporarily serves as a passage room to the bar that keeps working for takeaway. Mark initiates a dialogue with this space that gave up its exhibitory function as well as with a casual bar visitor with his cappuccino to go.
“In this intervention I am interested in the process of wearing out, how things change with time and what’s remembered.
The project transfers the ritual of inscribing into the gallery context where the audience influences the artwork immediately. The visitor has an opportunity to make a drawing of inscription on a piece of white paper thus becoming the co-author of the artwork. In this sense the sheet of paper acts as an alive organism under ongoing influence. At the end of every day I will erase everything drawn / written with a rubber. Every day the work can have different content depending on the input. While turn of the day signifies change of context and conditions that set apart the present from the past.
This project refers to the identity of a young artist who is influenced by various factors. Outlining the framework for the project, I barely control the process. Erasing the content of the drawings, I project onto the work the condition of change of context, the end of the gallery working hours.
The dimensions and layout of the paper sheets is defined by the space itself referring to the previous exhibition—they correspond to it completely. In this constructed environment we can witness a dialogue between place, visitor and artwork (ritual and material) that reveals the transformation of an object through time,” comments Mark Chehodaiev.
