On October 18, the XL Gallery presents a collective exhibition by Andrey Monastyrsky and Masha Sumnina (MishMash) - “Highlights and Undecipherable”. Сreating this project, the authors turned to the practices of "on-kawara" (named after the artist on-kawara, Jap. 河原温 Kawara On), or practices of observation and counting, especially appropriate in dark times. Both artists document reality in their own way - a reality about which and in which it is very difficult to talk, so that all that remains is to observe, noting the changes.

Andrey Monastyrsky photographed the same place for a year, a fenced construction area near the Sokolniki metro station. On the fence separating the area of ​​repair work from the street, a fence is drawn - again; something happens on the construction site from time to time, details change, new Suprematist forms of concrete objects, formwork, slabs appear. People rush in front of the fence, sometimes the artist himself is among them. In these, in fact, documentary photographs, Monastyrsky highlights individual details and areas, using Photoshop. He creates accents and points of attention, and seems to complicate what is happening even more, adding new meanings and layers to reality. The construction site at Sokolniki has another special meaning: it is located on the road to the site of the Collective Action action Three Portraits (2021), the video documentation of which can also be seen in the exhibition space.

Here it is worth recalling another work by Andrey Monastyrsky - a series of photographs "Earthworks" in 1987 and the text "Earthworks ("Motif of a peacock and a condor on the iconic exposition field of Moscow")". The author documented on black and white film various construction processes taking place in the city, and in the text he indicated that they are sometimes sources of special inspiration for artists, or “inspirators”. According to Monastyrsky, the landscapes of construction sites had a certain influence on the activities of artists who lived and worked near these zones. In particular, the author mentions a possible connection between the features of the visual and conceptual activities of Nikita Alekseev and Mikhail Roshal (the construction of the Darwin Museum), as well as Ilya Kabakov, whose studio was located next to the construction site of the house - "condor", the main Moscow office of the Lukoil company on Sretensky boulevard.

"Highlights" is not the only technique that Monastyrsky uses in his new project when working with photographs. Frames on top of which stripes are drawn with gold paint, stretching from point to point - a continuation of the Golden Lines series, which began back in 1996. According to the author, the golden drawings associated with certain areas of the base image serve as references to star constellations, cartographic symbols, and Taoist schemes from the Book of Changes.

Masha Sumnina also captures the changing reality in her own way, and for a year now she has been drawing objects that “have ceased to look like themselves.” Just like words that in the new reality no longer mean what they once meant - and, therefore, it is impossible to understand them correctly. In bright drawings, similar to the archaeological documentation of some alien expedition, there are objects in which something familiar is vaguely guessed, but still does not correspond to it, and signatures that may have once been clear, but are now blurred to unreadable.

- We are looking for signs in the combination and appearance of objects that will point us to something, but we cannot decipher them, because "each decryption is the creation of a new cipher"¹. It remains to look at everything, as for the first time.

One of the forerunners of the creation of the graphic series was the project of the MishMash group "Constructor for David Hume" (2019-2021), which explored the issue of creating a picture of the world from heterogeneous elements, observed sequences and connections. Visually, the "Designer" was a development of Hideoism (from the English hideous), a direction discovered by the MishMash group and dedicated to the aesthetics of random connections, absurd and "wrong" combinations.

¹ Laurent Binet, The Seventh Function of Language

Andrey Monastyrsky is an artist and art theorist, one of the founders of Moscow conceptualism and the Collective Actions group. Father of Masha Sumnina. He is a multiple participant of the Venice Biennale, including the representative of Russia at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011 (Andrey Monastyrsky and Collective Actions project Empty Zones, Russian Pavilion). Personal exhibitions of the artist were held at the XL Gallery (“Vetka”, 1996; “Carriers”, 2014; “Attribute”, 2021), the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (“Andrey Monastyrsky”, 2010), the Charim Gallery in Vienna (“Andrey Monastyrsky”, 2013) and others. Works are in the collections of the XL Gallery, the Tretyakov Gallery, MMOMA, the National Center for Contemporary Art, the Pompidou Center (Paris) and others.

Masha Sumnina is an artist, a member of the creative duet MishMash (Masha Sumnina and Misha Leikin). Daughter of Andrey Monastyrsky. In 2019, the MishMash group won the Tretyakov Prize (together with Olga Petrunenko), and in 2019 the duo was recognized as the artists of the year by the Cosmoscow contemporary art fair. Personal exhibitions of the MishMash group were held at the XL Gallery (“Transfer”, 2013; “Spa-Theater of Aging”, 2014), the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (“Prostheses and Replacements”, 2016), MMAM (“See you”, 2011; “The Day behind the day”, 2021), etc. The group’s works are in the collections of the XL Gallery, the State Tretyakov Gallery, MMOMA, the National Center for Contemporary Art, etc.