TV towers, 2022

Taisia Korotkova  

Black felt on the back of a waxed canvas.

Taisiya Korotkova's work invites reflection on a troubling duality: technological progress facing humanity's instinctive regression.

The Dark Forest series continues the artist's exploration of the relationship between human beings and technology. It consists of numerous felt pen drawings made on the back of waxed kitchen cloths, in various formats, ranging from 280 × 950 cm to small miniature works.

In this project, Korotkova imagines a present and a future in which humanity, guided by primitive instincts, has resorted to destructive cutting-edge technologies. There are no more men, only the ruins of military installations and nature, slowly erasing the vestiges of what was called the "civilization."

The drawings evoke illustrations of fairy tales, reinforcing the impression of an almost mythological warning. The plants depicted possess magical and medicinal properties. Standing before the ruins, they bear witness to the resilience and ancestral wisdom in the face of the rapid obsolescence of human "civilization."

"Dark Forest, by Taisia Korotkova, is the artist's first total installation. [...] It is not so much a blank and impenetrable thicket as it is a slightly deserted exhibition park, where the contours of grandiose and mysterious structures are drawn, behind the lace of branches, destined to present all sorts of marvels of progress: towers and domes, antennas and radars, missile silos and electric generators. [...]"

Taisia Korotkova's new project extends the themes the artist had begun to explore in her previous series of paintings. In Technology, Museum of Cosmonautics, Closed Russia, and others, she was interested in the mythology of progress and great achievements, as well as the legacy and ruins of scientific and technological utopia.

Tempera, Taisia's favored medium, was deliberately anachronistic. It gave her narratives an artificially distant perspective. The ruins of abandoned Soviet military installations recalled those depicted in Romantic painting, while the space suits displayed in museums seemed as old as Egyptian sarcophagi.

In Dark Forest, Taisia Korotkova adopts a radically different technique and scale. Painting gives way to black and white drawings which, according to the artist, refer to the old Art Nouveau illustrations of fairy tales: the dark forest is above all a story setting. [...] The images appear even more refined than in her previous paintings, meticulous and richly detailed. Yet, they no longer allow the viewer to maintain any distance: they envelop them in this dark forest where one gets lost. Their immateriality is that of an omnipresent specter that permeates everything.

Dark Forest can be qualified as a "hantological" work. Forged by Jacques Derrida, the term "hantology" first appeared in his 1993 work Specters of Marx. In the late 2000s, under the influence of British musical thinkers and critics Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds, hantology came to denote an electronic music genre, then a more general trend in contemporary culture, fascinated by the nostalgia for futures that never came to be. According to Fisher, the claustrophobia of a perpetual present and the feeling of the inevitability of capitalism are closely linked, to a large extent, to the collapse of the Soviet Union. [...]

Although most of the structures represented in the works of Dark Forest are functional and come from the military-industrial complex, they take, surrounded by vegetation in these monochrome "tapestries," the appearance of fantastic utopian architectures—utopias that could have been designed by any people, at any time. [...]

Other structures represented in Dark Forest have also attracted pilgrimages by "stalkers," visits by urban explorers, or narratives belonging to the conspiratorial folklore around old secret sites. The artist refers to this subculture of "stalkers," but also to Tarkovsky's film, which belongs to the hantological canon. The numerous communities present on social networks have transformed these ruins into almost kitsch objects, as Brian Dillon also noted. They thus join the clichés that constitute the romantic ruins of old paintings or postcards, becoming familiar elements of the picturesque. Taisia Korotkova plays with this idea by drawing her works in felt on the back of a cloth. It is not difficult to imagine that similar landscapes, populated by testing sites and bunkers, could soon adorn cloths or shower curtains, like the Eiffel Tower or old streetlights today.

We are not facing a "dark forest," but a real "ruins park." Instead of a nature that would take over civilization, we discover a botanical garden where all the plants are in reality artifacts, and not products of wild nature. The "herbarium" constituted by Taisia Korotkova includes both herbs and monumental trees. An additional category is dedicated to flora endowed with magical, medicinal, or intoxicating properties—that is, the ability to manipulate reality.

Dark Forest evokes the famous project by Pierre Huyghe presented at documenta 13. One discovered a lost world composed of swamps, cannabis plants, a statue whose head had been replaced by a living beehive, and a white dog with a pink paw. According to the artist's own words, this world constituted a kind of "compost pit" in which all objects found on site came to "rot," so that this "humus" would not ultimately return to nature, but would give rise to new cultural appearances.

In Dark Forest, "nature" itself seems to be a construction, a lure, an imitation produced by collective memory. Here, it is culture and the past, disguised as nature, that take precedence over modernity and progress, with their ambitions turned towards the future. They take root and are gradually buried under the roots. And this "nature" is far from being intended to "heal."

Irina Kulik