Illia Todurkin’s pop-up exhibition Preparing for Loss is a conceptual continuation of the previous Suspensus show by the OSRZ4 collective. It was exhibited on 7—14 August 2023 in the joint workshop at the Rema factory in Lviv. The exposition presented various forms of storage and archiving of memories and places that may be lost.
What to do when personal belongings can disappear any day? How to protect your property from destruction? We ask ourselves these questions every time we feel the moment of danger approaching, or we think about the loss of property with some regularity, trying to predict and prevent moments of future disasters. We rely on various ways to protect our belongings: when moving to makeshift ‘warehouses’ and ‘vaults’, wrapping in protective materials, hiding in storage rooms, or simply keeping a paranoid eye on them. Nevertheless, the objects with which we surround ourselves so diligently every day still do not always have a chance to be protected despite our best efforts, and the dangers that keep reminding us of themselves every day cannot be prevented every time.
In anticipation of the imminent loss of his artworks, Illia Todurkin developed his own methodology for their preservation. They are valuable as artworks in themselves, but the exhibition presents the art objects from the perspective of a potential threat of future disappearance. To preserve these things, the artist thinks not only about the possible scenarios of their ‘deaths’, but also develops models for their ‘resurrection’: various forms and methods of copying that grow out of the materiality of the objects themselves, their scale and significance. The author first recreates these things in copies: from reduced handmade replicas to technological reproductions. Here, objects exist face-to-face with their clones. Where does the aura end up when a work of art and its technical copy meet in the same place and time? They do not just overlap but also form new unities of both primary and secondary, death and resurrection. In the future, they may die, but their copies will remind us that they did exist, and the recreated image will resurrect not only those lost visual forms but also the crumbs of time of their presence.
In addition to the objects themselves, Preparing for Loss shows the ways of protecting artworks from possible destruction that the artist chooses. The first is copying—a method that involves reproducing objects in the form of a physical replica, which is four times smaller for easier storage and transportation. The second is the reproduction of 3D sculptures in a virtual space that can be interacted with.
“What’s on the table is a way to show the attempts to protect my belongings from destruction, in the form of copying notebooks and drawings, as well as creating virtual models of sculptures and thus protecting them. Now I think more about scanning objects than modelling them. Notebooks, I have a lot of them. I often look into the previous ones and revise the older drawings—they are all connected with the new ones, or the new ones flow from the previous ones. So I started carrying several notebooks with me, sometimes two, sometimes four, and they began to take up space. Now I like to print out small pages instead of huge ones—they fit more easily in my pocket. I was thinking about this while walking around during the explosions in early February 2022. The most important things will stay and wait for me to pick them up.”
Illia Todurkin
Curatorial team: Mykyta Babkin, Vita Kotyk, Oksana Ozarchuk
Produced by Vyacheslav Breus