TANYA AKHMETGALIEVA
ELECTRODREAM

Text: Olesya Turkina

Electrodream, the new project by Tanya Akhmetgalieva, migrates cyberspace images to the traditional domain or oils and watercolors on canvas and paper.

Tanya Akhmetgalieva won wide acclaim with her work in textile and video art. Akhmetgalieva’s massive textile installations — the likes of The Chrysalis Phase (2009), Clotho (2010), Allergy to Dust (2014) and some others — are intended as a representation of the hidden threads binding people, of their fears and inner dialogues. Her videos discombobulate and draw viewers into their currents for an immersive tactile experience even as the object-world dematerializes, as in Ghost Ship (2017), A Day Full of Hope (2018), and The Shining Cloud (2020). What these two lines of Akhmetgalieva’s work have in common is that the source image, whether woven of threads or created through video editing, is taken from the real world, the “analog” world. Its mythology is recognizable even when distorted, and its space implies our physical presence. There was a time when you could use this phone to make calls, and this merry-go-round used to whirl us around when we were little.        

Akhmetgalieva began to explore post-digital aesthetics in 2018. The images arising from the “ghostly web of illusions” (in the artist’s own words) had their premiere at her shows The Poisonous Berries (2019) and I Can Disappear (2020). Painted with oil on canvas, they add a human touch to the newest menagerie of online images. We know that the global digital deluge has changed our cultural terrain by populating the imaginary realm with countless visual memes from cyberspace. It is impossible to leave this new tech noir sphere. One way or another, the artist has to remain submerged, like Captain Nemo of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas.

Electrodream is a new series of paintings and graphic works conceived by Akhmetgalieva at the intersection of the manufactured 3D virtual space and the flat pictogram, the ABC of the digital era. The title is a partial reference to a certain procedure, invented in the Soviet Union in 1948, which forces the patient to go to sleep by applying mild electric shocks to the brain. Another aspect of the title Electrodream alludes to the 1968 sci-fi novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, regarded as the seminal novel of the cyberpunk genre, an attribution owed largely to its 1982 film adaptation Blade Runner by Ridley Scott. No wonder the author of Neuromancer, William Gibson, said Blade Runner had changed both how we see the world, and how we look at it.   

In Akhmetgalieva’s Electrodream, the comic book-style Boom and Bang color flashes are the electric shocks ushering the viewer into the fantasy world. The bright colored stars are, as it were, the warning lights alerting you to the fact that the doors of physical reality are closing. The electric hallucinations playing out onstage are of the kind that androids dream of, be it robots or operating systems. Like a lightning flash, this notional electric shock transforms the painting’s landscape, bleaching it to a blinding white. Unlike the modernist tradition, the color white is not emblematic of the void, the “beyond zero” or the eternity in Akhmetgalieva’s paintings. It is a supercharged electric or magnetic field, an electrified atmosphere. This explains the excruciatingly fine job she does on the primed canvas, covering it with white paint. A collage appears in the condensed air of the painting, featuring images purposely repeated in different combinations: digital gargoyles linking the jaws of a cat with the split tongue of a snake (the artist claims her cat was a snake in her prior lifetime), a chained gigantic clockwork maxilla, an oversize mosquito with the head of a Kewpie doll, and discs reminiscent of circular saws or planetary systems, mercilessly dissecting the painting. Akhmetgalieva calls them “removal apparatuses”. The discs are cutting out parts of the space erected by means of collage/editing, simultaneously removing something from the artist/viewer. This could be described as a parallax scrolling effect, except that the change in the position of the object in relation to distant background is dictated by an observer engulfed by the electrodream. In the Ursula K. Le Guin novel The Lathe of Heaven (1971) the protagonist, George Orr, possesses the faculty of altering reality with his “effective” dreams. When he awakes in one of the alternatives realities he dreams up, no one, except the dreamer himself, remembers how the world was before. The past has changed to align with the present, changing people’s memories in the process. The psychiatrist Orr goes to, named Haber, uses an instrument called the Augmentor to program Orr’s dreams as he sees fit, placing himself at the helm of a sleep research institution and pursuing his own social and political ambitions, eventually causing a catastrophe. In the end, Orr manages to reconstitute reality by disabling the device. 

What exactly happens in Tanya Akhmetgalieva’s Electrodream room where the takeout apparatuses are at work? The paintings fold into a polyptych, a humongous folding book we are about to enter. The multi-screen array of paintings and graphic works fashions an indoor habitat. Unlike a skull, pried open like a dollhouse and depicted graphically in the style of 1920s and 1930s mechanistic conceptions of man, today it takes the form of a multi-windowed interface. These painted “windows” bring forth images evocative of gallows humor, dark jokes, and horror films. Mechanical jaws flying around, clacking as if trying to say something. They cannot speak but they can bite. It is important for the artist that the jaws serve as a balance keeper for the body. It’s up to the jaws how you feel in spatial terms and how well you can keep your equilibrium. The Kewpie doll, a plastic baby replica grown to gargantuan proportions, looks truly horrifying. Having cast away its diapers, it is soaring in weightlessness like a demon that devours the human being from inside. The mosquito, born of and reared on the blood of Schizomass (the series of collective mixed media talks by Viktor Mazin, Saraf (Serafima Okuneva) and Tanya Akhmetgalieva at Radio House), like the character in Kurt Neumann’s 1958 film The Fly, presents a sickening symbiosis of man and insect. The vaguely menacing mosquito transforms its anthropomorphic “host”. All Akhmetgalieva projects follow in succession, their characters migrating from one medium to another. Cat jaws inside the snake maw, sparks, the proverbial “cherry on the cake” as the epitome of absurdity, spikes, the wooden swan from the French merry-go-round, chains as the symbol of un-freedom and lack of power to break free despite the illusion of flying, the electric discs… All these and other images, springing from the digital cradle and partially converted to video, revert to the painting. Another thing about Akhmetgalieva’s paintings are the ultimately vibrant colors. These are the colors of the electric dream, and this time they truly are “electric”. They have nothing to do with reality, being too bright and unreal for that. According to the artist, after you’ve spent a day working with these colors, the real world will appear black and white for a while. On the face of it, Electrodream may come across as a gamified take on painting, effacing its own facture and speaking the language of digital-era comic strips. And yet interactivity is not part of the message in these calculatedly cold, estranged paintings. It is unclear where the worlds are that are captured on canvas, what lies beyond, or who/where the creator or the viewer is. Their make-believe merriment fools no one.  The feeling is that of disorientation, of failing to grasp, of loss. It is the kind of feeling inherent in the transformation experienced when passing from the real world into a multitude of virtual ones.  Akhmetgalieva has applied such descriptions to her project as anesthesia, hypnosis, error, deception, trauma, fear, collapse, mutation, absence, cutting out… Shortly prior to the birth of Electrodream, Akhmetgalieva received a phone call from a friend who told her she’d had a dream in which Tanya said: “I’m not a candle, I’m not a hydrangea, I don’t look like a beetle…” This explains the titles of her paintings - I’m Not a Hydrangea, I’m Not a Mirror, I’m Not a Car — and watercolors: I’m Not Black, I’m Not Purple, I’m Not a Boulder, I’m Not a Book…

Affirmation through negation, the dreamlike quality of images, the flickering meanings, and preoccupation with the unconscious, the longings, automatic painting, and allusion all point to Electrodream’s distant inspiration — the aesthetic of surrealism from more than a hundred years ago. However, unlike surrealist art, which reflected the changes in traditional painting, Akhmetgalieva is looking at the screens. Her merging of dream and reality initially occurs in virtual space. Each screen is like an isolated organ, a black hole pulling us in. It is the entrance to the “non-world”, the removal apparatus. The person is just a shell, which the apparatus will suck out of you. There is a funnel depicted in just about every Electrodream canvas. It is a portal, symbolizing the state of passage to the “non-me” world, the kingdom of crooked mirrors in which space and time get removed.   

After all the hurdles, errors, and removals of the painted hallucinations, Akhmetgalieva immerses the viewer in the ephemeral space of her graphic works. Although some images familiar to us from her paintings also occur in her watercolors, they are not sketches for the paintings. The watercolor splotches and flashes of acrylics conjure up other spaces and new refractions on the white sheet of paper. A sweeping blackout leaves memories of the Removal of Time. This is the title of the work reminding us of the material culture of an era long gone, when analog dreams were interrupted by mechanical alarm clocks. The darkest watercolor in the series, The Langoliers, is dedicated to the characters in the eponymous novella by Stephen King who devour the past, leaving behind nothing but the mirthless scowl of the present, the black screen of Electrodream, sucking us in.