Since childhood, Sergey Bugayev-Afrika has been fascinated by solving rebuses and would often copy them from magazines. Over time, he amassed a vast archive, which became part of his artistic method. At the core of the project lies a series of fundamental questions that transform the exhibition from a collection of artifacts into an intense philosophical and anthropological inquiry. These questions have no definitive answers, yet the very act of posing them determines the radical relevance of art.

The first important question concerns the nature of language after historical trauma. How can one speak when a common language has been lost? The end of the Soviet era, which Afrika witnessed and experienced acutely, was not merely a political transformation. It was the collapse of a reality built upon a particular system of symbols, images, and words. Theorists describe such a condition of cultural trauma as the “Great Aphasia”—the loss of the capacity for coherent self-description, the disintegration of a shared narrative (in medicine, aphasia is a disorder or complete loss of speech). It is precisely at this moment that the rebus ceases to be an entertaining puzzle and becomes, for the artist, a form of utterance. Why? A classical rebus is a contract. It presupposes a code shared by all: this image is read as this word, this inverted sign means such-and-such. Soviet culture itself was such a contractual rebus on a gigantic scale: the hammer and sickle, the Young Pioneer neckerchief, the lines of Mayakovsky—all of these were parts of a common, easily decipherable ideological text.

Another question, therefore, concerns the boundary between the object, the thing, and the image. At what point does a sign cease to be merely a designation and acquire a magical autonomy? Here, in dialogue with the Russian intellectual tradition (Potebnya, Florensky), Afrika draws a subtle distinction. An object is a utilitarian functional unit (a chair, in order to sit). A thing is an object endowed with inner form, essence, history, and aura. A thing speaks. The horse’s skull in The Song of the Prophetic Oleg is not an object but a prophetic thing.

Soviet culture sought to transform everything into objects—elements of an ideological machine. The hammer and sickle were supposed to signify one thing only. By working with these signs, Afrika seeks to restore to them the status of things—enigmatic, polysemic, carrying within themselves layers of historical time and the collective unconscious. His copper plates are witnessing things, upon which time leaves its traces as it does upon a geological stratum. The artist creates a “meta-rebus.” He takes ready-made, already deciphered images and subjects them to a complex artistic process. He does not invent new riddles; he works with the fragments of a world that has already been solved. His tools are copper, acid, time, and light.

The copper plate here is not merely a material but a model of the psyche and of the historical layer. Like a photographic plate, it registers what takes place around it, darkens, becomes covered with patina, absorbs glimmers of light and the reflections of viewers. Chemical etching with acid becomes a metaphor for the erosion of memory, a process through which the clear contour of meaning dissolves, leaving behind a ghostly yet enduring trace. In these works, time itself materializes—not linear time, but stratified time, in which the past emerges through the present.

For this reason, Afrika’s rebuses are fundamentally impossible to solve completely. They cannot be resolved like a problem. They can only be experienced. Gazing into the shimmering surface of Rebus-28, we see not a cipher but a topography of memory. Archetypal images (an eye, a house, a bird) collide with fragments of everyday life (a chandelier, a ribbon), while the letters of the Russian alphabet lose their phonetic certainty, transforming into purely graphic, almost sacred signs. It is a waking dream, where value lies not in the “correct answer” but in the intensity of the gaze itself wandering through the labyrinth of meanings.

The theoretical background here is not an ornament but the very essence. The references to psychoanalysis (Freud) and schizoanalysis (Guattari, Deleuze) are key to understanding the scale of the project. Freud called dreams “the royal road to the unconscious.” Afrika charts his own path through the schizophrenic texture of the rebus—through its fractures, ruptures, and superimpositions. His works are a portrait of the collective unconscious of the post-Soviet individual, in which utopian impulses, the traumas of disintegration, irony, and nostalgia coexist simultaneously without forming a coherent narrative.

Another question concerns individual and collective memory, for the rebus is always the meeting place of two kinds of memory. Collective historical memory: Soviet slogans, Pioneer aesthetics, fragments of classical poetry (Pushkin), all of which once belonged to a shared cultural code; and the individual, biographical memory of each person. Where does the “I” end and the “we” begin? Has our personal memory not been inhabited, from the very beginning, by the ghosts of collective myths? This exhibition becomes a mirror of our present reality. Once again, we are living in an age of fracture—of ruptured meaning, information overload, and colliding truths. The old languages are failing once again. Afrika’s works, born at the moment of the historical rupture of the 1990s, prove to be strikingly contemporary. They offer not ready-made answers but a methodology for existing under conditions of semantic uncertainty. They teach us not to fear chaos but to regard it as fertile ground, where from the fragments of old codes new, more complex and more truthful forms of poetry and thought may emerge.