To Be Contained, To Be a Container

Andrey Chugunov

Glasgow Project Room

03/05/2024 - 12/05/2024

Installation View, To Be Contained, To Be a Container, Andrey Chugunov, Glasgow Project Room, 2024

To Be Contained, To Be a Container
03/05—12/05/2024
Monday – Sunday: noon-5pm

In 2020, I was returning to my hometown of Yekaterinburg after graduating from university in
Vladivostok. It was my second time travelling by train along the Trans-Siberian Railway – 5 days one way
to get off somewhere in the middle of nowhere. I had plenty of time to look out the train window and flip
through memories under static, almost unchanging scenery. I found that everything I remembered for the
last 2 years was vivid and colourful. Still, receding each time by one year the memories became
increasingly blurred to the point where I could remember almost nothing except that some situation had
happened to me. Everything slowly is decaying, turning into a distant echo of situations that happened to
me, as if all this had never happened at all. Because of this, it seems to me that I have lived a thousand
lives, and I can’t tell the whole story about any of them. All I have to do is watch the leaves of my
memories wither away, like the leaves of a spring cherry tree at the end of its blossom.

Sitting on the couch on the train, I was spinning a small smooth stone that I had picked up just before
leaving Vladivostok during my time on Rikord Island. It was the usual dark pebble for those places,
unremarkable and indistinguishable from all other stones of this secluded place. But I have a long-
standing habit, when I want to hold moments in my memory, I pick up small memorable pebbles as if
these stones were anchors of memories. More often they turn into a dead weight that I periodically
squeeze with the palm of my hand, trying to remember where they were picked up.

When I returned to Yekaterinburg, I was invited to the Shishim Hill art residence by curator Zhenya
Chaika. It was an interesting experience to return to my hometown and for the first time in my life I faced
burnout and a complete lack of ideas. And then I irrationally decided to walk around and record on a
VHS camera the current of water in the city rivers. My research extends to three overarching
characteristics in river basins. Firstly, water serves as a substance, dynamically interacting with objects
and reshaping their forms (you can see it on a mobile phone). Secondly, the water stream embodies an
imperceptible process, slipping away in time (at the kinescoped TV). Lastly, water manifests as a
dynamic graphical texture (tablet and plasma TV). The sound is generated through Karplus-Strong
synthesis based on recorded sounds of water streams.

And then I came to the form of the centrepiece of the exhibition – a technological sculpture that
represents the recursive water volume that can be metaphorized with the mind. The consensus among
scientists and philosophers underscores that consciousness is not a state but a recursive process which
is represented in the sculpture. Water in the cycled volume is pumped up from a ceramic bowl to a
burette that drops water from a ceiling on the stone which is placed inside the ceramic bowl. Each drop
in this looped system can be metaphorically compared to a memory recall.

And it seems that this black pebble is a memory of a place and a country that no longer exists, at least
for me. Since the war started in Ukraine, the only art form I can think of is memorial meditative spaces
where people can let go of their pain and grief. But all that remains is for us to keep making efforts, to
resist the sprawling authoritarian turn, to build networks of mutual aid and understanding. To move away
from generalisations, and to see individuals and hopes, joys, grief and aspirations.

Photo credit: Andrey Chugunov

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