Stella Art Foundation is opening the exhibition season with a personal project by Moscow artist Roman Sakin, who has been drawn to an endeavour which is extremely pressing at this time: forming pictures of the world and creating the material tools for that fundamental effort.
Roman Sakin has created sculptural objects and multi-component installations that allude to problems in classical and contemporary science and are simultaneously full of irony. As he finds angles in his worldview that enable him to blend seemingly incompatible things — science with art and global problems with dollhouse materiality — he manages each time to create a fresh model of the universe in which serious adults can enthusiastically play.
In the Foundation’s main gallery, viewers will find themselves in a residential interior transformed by Roman Sakin into a polygon in which experiments are conducted with various systems of measurement. These systems are disguised as ordinary objects used in our everyday lives or are presented as absolutely new, yet practical and essential items. At the same time, a unified system of measurement is on display in the small hall, which has been marked out geometrically and segmented into several zones.
Roman Sakin: “One thing that has hardly been done at all is to study the structure of the world not in the way that science does, but in the way that only art can. In order to do that information from the standpoint of a specific observer is needed rather than objective information. The correct thing to do is to put the observer at the centre of the universe. And that observer’s first task will be to measure the world.”
