17 May 2018

On June 9, 2018, at 6.30 PM, IZOLYATSIA presents Notebook with a Missing Page—a new exhibition by Pavlo Makov, artist who has been involved with the institution since its foundation. Significantly, the exhibition opens on IZOLYATSIA Day marking the foundation’s forced relocation from Donetsk to Kyiv four years ago. Makov’s utopian forecasts about the future of civilisation and the new social order are building a bridge connecting IZOLYATSIA’s past with its present moment.

Notebook with a Missing Page is a multimedia project consisting of an intimate sketchbook, a limited edition art book, and a huge map of a fictional city of Dopo.

Borys Filonenko:

“Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing—between two fictions”
Emil Mihai Cioran

Pavlo Makov’s notebook is made of city plans, both real and fictional. Behind a grey cover tied by a rubber stretch are the artist’s reflections of recent years. They are concerned with one particular futurist hypothesis, according to which the human world will be defined, half a century from now, not by two hundred countries, but six hundred megalopolises.    

Opposed to the notebook is Makov’s masterplan for a global city of Dopo complemented by two plans of smaller settlements, female- and male-shaped accordingly. Urban blocks of the global city respect rigid vertical and horizontal structures and consist of residential buildings of three kinds, factories-warehouses, chimneys, and watchtowers. Their exact functions (how densely populated the buildings are; which of the factories have been turned into an art centre; do the chimneys smoke? is the checkpoint working?) are hard to identify. For Dopo is a city of the future. 

Whether to equate the chaotic drawings in the notebook and the intaglio of the city calculated to the last building, or to ultimately juxtapose them, an eponymous art book has been created, titled Do Po. 

An assumption about the fate of the cities, verbalised but not materialised, changes the idea of scale and functioning of the space, of distances and systemically important phenomena, of values and challenges. In Makov’s artistic practices that have been focused, since the 1990s, on the problem of presence, the realisation of the further transformations of place in which one lives becomes a starting point for discussing the problem of correspondence. Makov writes: “The question in not to what extent your plan of a Place does not correspond to the existing plan of those living in it; the question is to what extent these two plans can correspond at all.”  

 Artist exists in a liminal state between constants and potentialities: between the feminine and the masculine; the reality and the dream; between the planning integrated into a situation and a plan being fulfilled in spite of all the givens; between the space of the street and of the apartment; between a concrete foundation block, a concrete block making a defensive construction, a concrete block serving as a prototype for horizontal housing, etc. Between drawings in the notebook, vector images transferred to the book, and the intaglio of the big city map.     

A century ago, industries would form cities around them, the so-called “monotowns.” Pavlo Makov’s Dopo is a monotown built around a notebook with a missing page.

“Dopo” means after in Italian. For those who know it, the name of the city sounds like a promise of a future.

EXHIBITION DETAILS

Author:
Pavlo Makov

Opening:
June 9, 2018, 6.30 PM

Schedule:
June 9 – July 22, 2018, Monday to Sunday, 10 AM – 8 PM

Address:
IZONE, vul. Naberezhno-Luhova 8, Second Floor.