It took me a long time to let go of Igor Severyanin’s poem Villa mon repos (1921):

Meat ate meat, meat ate asparagus,
Meat ate fish and the wine poured.
And having paid for meat, in half-meat carriage
Suddenly rolled to the meat in a large-feathered hat.

Meat caressed meat and to meat gave itself.
And created meat under prescriptions of the world.
Meat was ill, rotted and turned into a mass
Of stinking decay, inherent in the meat. 

Smoothly moving from the figurative of flesh and personal history, the fusion of corporeality and memories, the project “Heartstanding” expands its boundaries: it is tied not to an individual subject, the protagonist, but to the communal, all-human. All the “meat” of emotions and feelings goes beyond the limits of a particular body and transforms space.

The French poet Stéphane Mallarmé wrote that the flesh is sorrowful. However, I would say that its inherent finitude and therefore fundamental melancholy at the same time exacerbates its joy. In the exhibition I intended to show what we are like in impulse, in movement and rest, how feelings are dense, unbound from tangible things, and how all the most joyful and unbearable things in us are, of course, consummate. For we live now, today and a little bit tomorrow.

Darya Kalugina

Darya Kalugina’s project “Heartstanding” is about passion for life, about the merging of man with the world in moments of intense feelings. The artist catches these states, reflecting them in the vibration of her painting, inundating colors. The bride’s dress, ignited by love, a girl dissolving into the sea sunset like a mermaid, raised glasses of wine, spilling into a scarlet lake, dancing, turning into a flame, a whirlwind of bodies. Darya Kalugina takes plots from family photo archives and randomly discovered footage, infusing nostalgia for something that may never have happened in her life. “I mourned before I met loss,” in the words of poet Rainer Maria Rilke.

Curator: Nadya October

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