Tatiana Nazarenko
15 Jan - 03 Feb 2008
Tatiana Nazarenko
One summer day
The Queen of Hearts, she made some tarts,
All on a summer day:
The Knave of Hearts, he stole those tarts,
And took them quite away!
Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
It was a summer day when a butterfly flapped its wings on a window pane, a woman sunbathed naked near the river, a lady sang with a smile the happiness that summer brings along while people listened to her and rejoiced, and the sun was about to set.
With her video camera Tatyana Nazarenko captured these fragments of a summer day in her life and built an isba to keep them. People are invited to come and celebrate with her the beauty of that day. They can enjoy the banquet but are not allowed to enter the isba. Watching the images of that summer is possible only from the outside through the widows.
Setting a fence between the audience and the life of the little wooden house is a necessity. For a very simple reason. Nazarenko is asking her visitors to pay extra care and look very carefully at what is going on inside. She does not want her visitors to pry, she only wants the poem she has composed with her video camera to be listened to.
More than anything else, One Day in Summer is a visual poem. It tells of very simple things in a simple, instinctive manner that one would call a “primitive” manner – e.g., rough editing, no visual effects, static camera. It could not be differently, after all. What counts most here is to be truthful to life. The subjects Nazarenko chose are not fiction that entertains. On the other hand, she is not afraid of showing images that to some might even appear to be boring. She has committed herself not to lie. At the end of the day, this is what art is all about, to show life the way it is. This is also why no story with a beginning and an end is told on the walls of the isba. Everything starts instead right from the middle, like summer is in the middle of the calendar year.
The events taking place in a summer day are then vivid testimonies of a particular stage of life. Summer is the long-awaited season that comes after the cold winter and the awakening of spring. It is the season of reason and full awareness. Summer is, ultimately, a state of mind, that of constantly looking for the essence of things. So, it happens that people live their summer waiting for something extraordinary to take place. And while waiting, they long for poetry – the poetry that we found in a sunset and in a butterfly flapping her wings –, and try to be merry, eat in the open air, sing songs and dance. While we wait, lives goes on and on. The sunset is there, beautiful and worrying at the same time, as a reminder that dusk will follow, but not now, that will happen one day in autumn. And then the night.
Stuck in the limbo of expectation, Nazarenko’s little wooden house is located in anyone of us. The portraits of nature and people projected on its walls transcend the geographical place – rural Russia, that has been the artist home for the past twenty years – where they were recorded. Nazarenko is not interested in showing the soul of a nation. She is doing much more, she is exposing her own soul.
Antonio Geusa
One summer day
The Queen of Hearts, she made some tarts,
All on a summer day:
The Knave of Hearts, he stole those tarts,
And took them quite away!
Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
It was a summer day when a butterfly flapped its wings on a window pane, a woman sunbathed naked near the river, a lady sang with a smile the happiness that summer brings along while people listened to her and rejoiced, and the sun was about to set.
With her video camera Tatyana Nazarenko captured these fragments of a summer day in her life and built an isba to keep them. People are invited to come and celebrate with her the beauty of that day. They can enjoy the banquet but are not allowed to enter the isba. Watching the images of that summer is possible only from the outside through the widows.
Setting a fence between the audience and the life of the little wooden house is a necessity. For a very simple reason. Nazarenko is asking her visitors to pay extra care and look very carefully at what is going on inside. She does not want her visitors to pry, she only wants the poem she has composed with her video camera to be listened to.
More than anything else, One Day in Summer is a visual poem. It tells of very simple things in a simple, instinctive manner that one would call a “primitive” manner – e.g., rough editing, no visual effects, static camera. It could not be differently, after all. What counts most here is to be truthful to life. The subjects Nazarenko chose are not fiction that entertains. On the other hand, she is not afraid of showing images that to some might even appear to be boring. She has committed herself not to lie. At the end of the day, this is what art is all about, to show life the way it is. This is also why no story with a beginning and an end is told on the walls of the isba. Everything starts instead right from the middle, like summer is in the middle of the calendar year.
The events taking place in a summer day are then vivid testimonies of a particular stage of life. Summer is the long-awaited season that comes after the cold winter and the awakening of spring. It is the season of reason and full awareness. Summer is, ultimately, a state of mind, that of constantly looking for the essence of things. So, it happens that people live their summer waiting for something extraordinary to take place. And while waiting, they long for poetry – the poetry that we found in a sunset and in a butterfly flapping her wings –, and try to be merry, eat in the open air, sing songs and dance. While we wait, lives goes on and on. The sunset is there, beautiful and worrying at the same time, as a reminder that dusk will follow, but not now, that will happen one day in autumn. And then the night.
Stuck in the limbo of expectation, Nazarenko’s little wooden house is located in anyone of us. The portraits of nature and people projected on its walls transcend the geographical place – rural Russia, that has been the artist home for the past twenty years – where they were recorded. Nazarenko is not interested in showing the soul of a nation. She is doing much more, she is exposing her own soul.
Antonio Geusa