Text: Brecht Wright Gander
On Maria Koshenkova
Maria Koshenkova was on her way to becoming a ballerina when a difference of two centimeters, the amount by which her jetés fell short, closed the dance academy’s doors to her. Instead, she entered the University of Art in St. Petersburg. There, in part for practical reasons, she turned to glass–a medium that was so unpopular the university equipment was almost always available for use. She would have found the situation similar at an American university. Glass remains an underexplored medium of contemporary art. The primal physical challenge of working with blazing hot, frangible material runs counter to the prevailing digital, frictionless energies of our times.
Although at university equipment was readily available, the material itself was in short supply. Koshenkova adapted by salvaging and melted down the screens of junked TVs, broken bottles, and damaged windows. Only after graduating and receiving the Ole Haslunds Scholarship residency in Denmark was Koshenkova able to work with a generous stock of fresh material. This proved fruitful: the next year she was awarded The Glass Prize from the Hempels Glass Museum. During this period, the artist often employed readymade forms. She produced a series of glass castings iterating sections of hemp rope. Small gestures of coiling and twisting, they trade the ductile strength of rope for the characteristic tension of glass–a material that weds delicacy to permanence. Glass relics can survive for millenia only to be shattered in an instant. Koshenkova’s 2021 series, GET ME OUT OF THIS IDEA, mutated the form of the ornate wineglass, an artisanal staple, with explosive interventions and piebald splotches of color. In popular imagination, working with glass has often meant hewing to traditional aesthetics–a premise Koshenkova has forcefully rejected. GET ME OUT OF THIS IDEA, also illustrates the artist’s enduring restlessness. Just as rope is something which can constrict and became, for her, something which could be shattered, the treatment of glass as an aesthetically conservative medium became, for Koshenkova, a generative pressure driving her to innovate.
From objects, Koshenkova’s subject matter moved to the body–and particularly the body’s forbidden pallet of the flayed, the eviscerated, and the mutilated. We Walked the Earth, a collaboration with Uffe Isolotto for the Danish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2022, included gory, placenta-like glass forms seemingly disgorged by Uffe’s hyperrealist sculptures of suffering centaurs. The theatricality of this collaboration may have opened a path to the latest transformation of Koshenkova’s practice. Instead of her works being embedded in environments or staged in situations, they are now seeding or germinating environmental situations, functioning not as props but as propagators. In Virkeligt Uvirkeligt, Koshenkova’s second solo presentation at Marina Gisich Gallery, we see this instinct reach its maturity.
Virkeligt Uvirkeligt features molten-seeming coagulations of glass, rich in colors which glide and fade and sizzle from lichen green to claret to beige, suspended in a contorted flux of becoming. They hang on ropes, they lay, paralyzed mid-writhe, on steel planes, and they are pinioned by metal lances amid industrial scaffolding. The two rooms of the exhibition are lit in contrast: one brightly illuminated, the other dim. This countering echoes across formal and conceptual layers. The organicism of the glass is countered by the orthogony of the metal. And the glasswork itself presents contrary characteristics: it appears to be coiling and distending even while remaining still. This simultaneous impression of motion and stillness disorients a viewer’s experience of time–an effect which is reinforced by the dazzling density of detail, which forces a viewer to look closely and slowly. Not only are the glassworks dimensionally and texturally complex on their outer surfaces, but they generate combinatory effects by overlapping translucencies and hollow interiors. As one’s attention is stretched, a new and interesting sensation arises: perhaps the glassworks are not still in spite of their seeming animacy, but are simply moving along a temporal plane that is more geological than biological. This is, of course, factually true. Glass, in scientific parlance, is an “amorphous solid,” it is always, ever so slowly, deliquescing. Glass drools at the tempo of centuries.
The relations Koshenkova curates between the glass and steel vary between functionally supportive, violent, and gentle. In the room with dimmed lighting, three imposing steel sheets swoop down from the wall and drape over a horizontal, waist height bar. In the dip of each swoop, a luminous glass form is nestled in a manner suggesting fetal helplessness. A bare rectangle of steel adhered to an adjacent wall seems to signify a passageway while presenting an impenetrable surface. Beside it, two glass forms, patterned with veins and tendrils, coil sinuously on tubular steel apparatuses that call to mind stands for IV drips. All together, the space suggests the maternity ward of an alien craft. This is in marked contrast to the first room visitors pass through, which has bright gallery lighting and large windows facing the street. There, hanging on ropes amid a bracing of steel posts, the glass bodies seem to be playfully exercising in a jungle-gym. This impression is jarringly destabilized by a few ominous aberrations. A spare steel platform resembling a mortuary table is preceded by a series of steel steps. On it a glass body reposes, partly slathered in black. In one medievally sinister installation, an incarnadine gibbet of glass is pierced by a single sharpened rod sticking out from the wall just below the ceiling.
Just as the word "ineffable" is a contradiction–signifiying, and so in some measure expressing, the inexpressible–Koshenkova’s self-negating title Virkeligt Uvirkeligt (which translates to “Really Unreal”) contains a logical paradox: all conceivable unrealities exist within the reality of the conceivable. Glass is primarily fused silica. And in rendering from geological matter results that look biological, Koshenka has drawn two concurrent but alien seeming temporalities into view at once.
