Ksenia Shinkovskaya
Soft Submersion

Only a century ago, a monster was the embodiment of ‘the other’ – a borderline projection of all hidden human impulses. Nowadays, monsters appear to have carved out an identity of their own, albeit still accompanying – and even assisting – humans, whether as fidget toys or as mobile app mascots. Their chimerical nature is also gradually being erased, meaning that familiar combinations like centaurs, sphinxes, and hippogriffs are getting fewer and far between, superseded by a kind of sentient slime – a living matter increasingly devoid of human likeness. This is completely explainable, as every era constructs its monsters to reflect the currently predominant social fears.

The humanities of today ostensibly try to apologise to planet Earth for the many centuries of considering man the measure of all things and thus ruining it all. For instance, the monster in contemporary Japanese animation is likely to take on the form of a person oppressing and destroying the harmonious natural world in which under each stone lives a cute little spirit. Some of Ksenia Shinkovskaya’s creations directly reference this tradition. By using an archaic medium and organic materials, the artist tries to capture the invisible presence of a natural spirit, revealing its fragility and evanescence. Animating various objects, she makes an attempt to come up with visuals capable of restoring the blissful sensation of being one with nature that had for centuries been embodied in folklore and literature.

A certain retro aesthetics inspired by the human-like monsters of the past is also present in Shinkovskaya’s works, with some of them staring at us with the beady blue eyes of 19th-century dolls – not at all scary, more like touchingly incongruous. Her works seem in perfect sync with the contemporary visual culture, their warmth and gentle humour erasing the line between eeriness and cuteness. It is, after all, not that important who the real monster is: the viewer or the gigantic mosquito. What matters is the potential dialogue between these two which can take place right in the exhibition space.