Wanderers 

Personal exhibition in the business center on Rizhskaya. Moscow.

Wanderers is the first solo exhibition of artist Liana Darenskaya. The author invites the viewer to follow the entire process of the formation of existence, how matter, including life, is born from chaos, and then acquires consciousness, a “person”. The wanderer in this context appears in two guises — he is both a hero who comprehends this world, and a guide who protects and guides it. Throughout the entire exhibition we are haunted by the natural, in particular woody — is this a reference to the Tree of Knowledge and its tempting fruits, or is it a symbol of the natural and natural beginning of everything, point Zero, from which the history of mankind begins?

Liana carefully balances at the intersection of three traditions — scientific, Taoist and Orthodox — which allows her to mix different symbolism and enhance the effect on the understanding viewer. At the same time, it is important to note that it unites all these traditions with a common basis, the very essence — the integrity and self-sufficiency of man. Everything is inside each individual and we can find all the light only in ourselves; external attributes are rather conditional. For me, as an outside observer, this exhibition is a kind of philosophical and visual essay, where each work is multi-layered, and you want to immerse yourself in each work headlong.

The narrative of birth from chaos is, on the one hand, a simple and logical plot for any story (we have already seen and read so much of this), but on the other hand, it is from this perspective, at the intersection of three disciplines, that the author manages to reveal this topic from rather unconventional and unexpected sides. It is not often that we come across such optics in our experience. Here, scientific knowledge harmoniously coexists with religion and philosophy, mutually complementing and deepening each of these areas. 

Exhibition curator Ekaterina Kozlova