Solo Exhibition of Siyana Shishkova
January 31 – February 18
Opening: January 31, 6:30 PM, Triadtisa 5
Siyana Shishkova took part in Slopi Kopi's residency in December 2023, which resulted in a pop-up exhibition entitled "The Arching Dream of the Giant Tortoise". This exhibition featured materials from the process of creating printed works, collages, a photobook and a leporello book.
In the current exhibition at KO-OP's new space at Triaditsa 5, Siyana develops these formats into finished works, continuing her visual exploration of the wound in its literal and unseen manifestations.
In the process of the exhibition, Siyana focused particularly on Jacques Lacan's concept of the Real. This represents the underlying indescribable and unbeatable aspect of subjectivity that stands beyond speech and imagination. She asks what kind of sensibility would emerge if we were "stuck" in the Real and its most direct experience, without the soothing structure of the symbolic. A hallucinogenic perception of the world - it is terrifying, indescribable, beautiful, powerful, born and dying simultaneously. To get to it she explores the visual language of texture and the image of the wound as an allegory for the trauma that marks the conflict between the Real and the Symbolic.
Through the leporello book presented, Siyana proposes a return to proto-symbolism by tracing the formation and death of a micro-world whose subject is the gesture of the hand that weaves the birth of meaning. In the collages, the image is disintegrated and the Real is presented as texture without line and chronology in contrast to images and symbols,
Siyana's works constantly oscillate between the realms of language, of symbols, of images, of the familiar and between those of the ineffable, unexplainable feelings. This is done through collaging, layering, destroying and the deliberate use of images with rough textures, which challenges photography's claim to faithfully depict what we see. The results are ethereal, unsettling landscapes in which figuration and abstraction merge, conveying at once a sense of certainty and anxiety, of understanding and confusion. The exhibition captures this complex interaction and dissonance and offers an alternative to how they can exist in a state of tangled harmony.
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