By Maria Bregman, writer, art and literary critic
Most archive exhibitions are incredibly boring, frankly. You walk into a room, look at some dusty papers under glass, and you leave. But there is a new space in Hackney that handles things differently, and it is actually worth your time. It is the Prokofiev Studio on Ramsgate Street. And their first exhibition, Bending Time, opens on the first of May.
A large chunk of Oleg Prokofiev’s workspace from the 1990s was rebuilt by the organisers right in the middle of the room. The original studio used to be on Dace Road, obviously. You walk in, and you are forced to look at his old wooden sculptures sitting next to his sketchbooks and loose photographs, things like that. Prokofiev started making these heavy wooden knots after he visited New York in the late seventies. Thick pieces of wood are twisted into some sort of chain or garland. And the only rule was that the wood had to loop back to the start. It is a closed circuit, basically.
The curator, Anzhela Popova, has refreshing attitude towards old objects. As she explains: "The idea behind Bending Time is simple: preserving history amounts to no more than elegant taxidermy, nothing more. We do not lock history up in glass cases and leave it there. History is yanked from the archives and forced to change, and meaning only survives in this brutal mutation of the original context."
And they took that idea quite literally. Other materials were brought in by two contemporary artists to sit alongside Prokofiev’s wood. Kirill Basalaev uses cement. People usually build permanent walls with cement, obviously. But his cement works are deliberately fragile. They are covered in cracks and scratches. They just look like dirty bits of broken pavement, really. Cement is used by him to show that memory is broken, I suppose.
Then there is Valentino Vannini. He mixes concrete with petroleum jelly, wax, and bitumen. Architectural structures are built to look like scaffolding, and then they are allowed to sag and melt. Soft materials are pushed against hard ones. The whole thing just collapses slowly in front of you. You watch the materials fall apart in real time.
If you have a free afternoon this May, you should probably go to Ramsgate Street. The art market is currently filled with safe, flat paintings because they are easy to sell to people with expensive flats. This exhibition is completely different. The space itself is tied to the Prokofiev family, with Gabriel Prokofiev handling the musical environment. You stand there looking at melting wax and old timber. And the smell jelly probably sticks to your coat for a while.
