Congratulations! You’ve Reached The Next Level | Igor Samolet
26 Dec 2023 – 04 Feb 2024

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©Copyright Fabula Gallery | by Rattlesnake Group Limited
Dates: 26 Dec 2023 – 04 Feb 2024
Artist: Igor Samolet
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January 10, 2024

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Congratulations! You’ve Reached The Next Level | Igor Samolet
26 Dec 2023 – 04 Feb 2024

Congratulations! You’ve reached the next level
Igor Samolet
26.12. 2023 – 04.02.2024

“You’ve reached the next level” — this phrase evokes instant associations with video and computer games. All the missions are completed, the achievements are collected, you can move on, to the finale, where there will be no further levels.

In Igor Samolet’s installation, the levels remain hierarchical – from simple to complex, symbolizing the challenge of overcoming certain boundaries, physical or ephemeral. Elements of the installation also reference the amount of effort that is required to do this, all the things in past that one must leave behind. In the meantime the structure resembles a recognizable form — a Christmas tree, or the skeleton of the artificial one, similar structures appear in Moscow in December. On the abstract side, one can see a sales funnel or Maslow’s pyramid of needs looking at Igor’s object.

Typically for Samolet’s artistc language, a multi-level installation is just a shell for the synthesis of an equally multi-level and contradictory reality. The fairy-tale round dance of book illustrations and sketches by Ivan Bilibin is impersonal with folk motifs and the gaping emptiness of Face in Hole Boards. Screenshots are merged into the creeping line, news headlines in them relate to everyone, as well as to no one in particular. The last level poses a serious choice: “There are two chairs…” and the inability to “save.”

You really made it to the next level. But is there a reason to celebrate it?

Elmira Minkina


Project partner

SPHERE Contemporary Art Foundation, Moscow