Be it a sculpture offering an alternative form of communication, an installation combining the traditional aesthetics, material, and tactility of a tapestry with augmented reality (AR) technology and virtual space, or a recyclable LED strip wall image that dissolves national borders from the perspective of the International Space Station Alexandra Dementieva’s works presented in Budapest examine the possibilities and forms of communication, representation, meaning, and interaction within cultures and societies, as well as between cultures, eras, and even universes.
Each of the works features a historical connection to traditional media (sculpture, tapestry, panel painting, as well as film and video, which are now considered traditional). But while Dementieva uses traditional forms in conjunction with the latest digital technologies, what is important to her is not the experimental exploration of their inherent possibilities, but their natural use as obvious visualization tools, as a new level of representation.
In different ways and at different levels of involvement, some of the works invite the viewer to interact. For example, the messages woven into the tapestries of the series Missive can be deciphered with the help of an app, while in the installation Chronoscape, the viewer standing in front of it becomes a participant, their presence “accelerating” time until their image falls apart and then disappears completely. The themes are serious—they belong to the fundamental questions of existence and survival. This makes it even more important that, in addition to a scientific and philosophical approach, Dementieva’s works are characterized by a kind of elegant irony and subtle humor.
Born and raised in the Soviet Union, Dementieva has lived and worked in Belgium since the late 1980s. She was raised by her biochemist grandfather in a dacha near Moscow. Natural science and an ecological approach, as well as the everyday experience of science, society, and the environment as an interconnected system, have thus shaped her sensibility since childhood—thinking about all this and the observed, explored processes and interactions of her childhood have determined the focus of her attention.