Victoria Kosheleva | Screen

The Fatamorgana project was born in 2016, as a part of Victoria’s personal exhibition in Moscow. Part of it – the “Screen” installation – had been shown at the fābula gallery stand at Cosmoscow contemporary art fair in September 2020. This object had been created within the gallery’s programme of collaborations “fabula x”. Sails, which are used in it, are often associated with freedom, borderlessness and the constant drive forward. The metal frame to which the sails are attached is a contrasting element – it simultaneously supports the construction and establishes the limits.

The screen’s function is to serve as a temporary wall: to cover and protect one from the world. For Victoria this object is a metaphor of the boundary, which ‘separates’ our comfort zone from the surrounding space.

Amongst the other semantic prototypes of the Fatamorgana project there is another ubiquitous yet sacral construction – the glasshouse, which can be found on almost any countryside property in Russia. This object serves to create an ideal milieu for the plants to exist.
The variegated multicolored mosaic of windsurfing sails is an allusion to the Gothic stained-glass tradition: objects which draw not only the physical border between the worlds, but also the transcendental one.