F40* 

*the ICD is using this code for phobic anxiety disorder

I watched Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” when I was 5 years old and then… the game has begun. All my childhood I devoured all horror books and movies which I could find. I used to hide from mirrors, turn dolls away to the wall and shudder from the phone calls in fear to hear “seven days”. The fear made my reality sharp, filled it with its own new meanings. Being a shy and timid child, I liked that feeling of invulnerability in front of fabled monsters.

Some time had passed when I noticed that plots of horror stories repeat and after that my addiction to it transformed into an anthropological interest. Why should we run away from the beast if we can join it? Google and global culture showed me in an instant why we dread various things. Since then I have been treating any horror as an experiment with reality perception.

I’m 27 now and the scariest monster in my life became Time: I am very scared of “don’t have time”.

Will it be a vampire or clock ticking, a decease or loneliness — we are afraid of different things, but our fears are similar. F40 is a project that describes which physiological processes and conceptions we associate with the meaning of “fear” and how we describe our senses at the moments of fright.

I look into Russian National Corpus materials, search for metaphors in fictional and non-fictional texts that compare fear with things like fire, water, a sting, a thread. On basis of these metaphors I make the shapes and create artifacts. Objects of my transformations are: cards from child game (x-ray of scull and lungs), balloons, soviet alarm clock, walnut, effervescent tablets and jar from stewed fruit juice. Now I’m “playing” again by interacting with these objects with child perspective and getting stronger during this process.

Cognitive distortion: I take into account the most typical linguistic manifestations, I put emotion in an artificial box, isolate it from details and divide it into composition in order to see the true natural phenomena.  

  Group exhibition within the festival of contemporary art “48 Hours of Novosibirsk”, 2021 

Creative space “Art El”, curator — Olga Shiyan, director — Valeria Borodina;

 Photos and videos: Olga Shiyan, Valery Borodina, Valery Matyukhin.