Dystopia Station.2020 Installation
Steel rod, card index cabinets
An airship assembled from catalogue filing cabinets hovers in the space of a former NKVD troops garage—today the Central Exhibition Hall Manege. The image of an aerial vessel, constructed from a steel modernist frame and archival card-index drawers, unites the paradox of unfreedom and movement. The airship becomes a metaphor for an “aerial prison”—a space where thought is forced to exist under a regime of totalitarian control. The filing drawers, which once held the index cards of imprisoned engineers and scientists of the sharashkas, are transformed here into containers of memory. They serve as a reminder of the archive as an instrument of power, and of memory as an act of resistance. The open drawers pose a question to the present: to what extent is the state willing to make information about the repressions accessible?
