Exact Fantasy, a site-specific installation by New York–based Latvian artist Viktor Timofeev, is the artist’s first solo exhibition in Lithuania.
Timofeev’s interdisciplinary practice weaves together personal experience and speculative imagination, combining video, painting, software, installation, and sound to construct semi-fantastical environments.
Created specifically for Editorial, Exact Fantasy presents two parallel domestic spaces filled with belongings of their fictional inhabitants – a prolific artist and an amateur astronomer who live as neighbors. Both seem driven by an obsessive attempt to understand and systematize their surroundings, employing logic, empiricism, and scientific theories while immersing themselves in visions shaped by imagination and fiction. One character focuses on the Moon, after noticing a mysterious movement in one of its craters through a telescope. Meanwhile, the walls of the artist’s studio are covered with drawings and paintings reflecting visual research – from observation-based depictions of a small medieval town to abstract, visionary works.
The two neighbors symbolically represent two approaches to scientific research – empirical and theoretical. One tries to understand the environment through observation and study, while the other creates a logical yet idealized system imposed upon the world; one looks inwards, the other outwards. Structurally, the exhibition is also divided into two parts: a partition faces the entrance, allowing visitors to see both spaces as they enter. The artist draws inspiration from Ilya Kabakov’s total installations, Stanislaw Lem’s science fiction, and Karen Barad’s non-fiction writing.
Neighbors by Lucia Love
Legend speaks of two brave souls working tirelessly towards the truth, side by side, so purposefully and with such focus that each never knew the other was there.
One was an explorer ↓ from a humble village who found a shortcut to another world. ↓ claimed the path was located deep within themself, and so ↓ plunged hands first, into their chest, inching ouroborus-like, until ↓ pinched out of existence on this earthly plain. Before this hermetical achievement, the explorer would wander about narrow streets, passing under the cast shadows of neighboring homes like a creature possessed. On occasion ↓ would stop to consider a particular stretch for some unknown qualities the scenery held. For a while ↓ seemed to be taking in the architecture, but then would turn their unfocused gaze and begin following invisible tracks looping in the void. Years of this odd examination gave the village folk gumption to pry. When approached with inquiries to their activity, they’d mutter, “what is here needs to go. I’m letting it go.”
For the explorer had received the clarion call to release their ties to objectivity. It was the presence of this call that ↓ considered their closest ally in the battle against illusion. So when it assured ↓ that all of the outside world is mutable, the explorer opened the door to possibility. On the other side, ↓ could still be seen, but no one could reach them. And after a few attempts, the explorer quit trying to reach back through this door too. What frontier lay within the greyish mist within was far more enticing than trying to communicate their findings to an otherwise bewildered crowd. Thus began their interventional period where the explorer was introduced to a generative force that populated their days with new wonders, and dark fascinations that warped their sight. ↓ feverishly recorded what sprang forth from a primordial rorschach blot swirling past their mind’s eye, working to externalize the logic revealed to ↓ alone. It was this internal logic that illuminated a path to the end of their days, leaving their visionary work as a roadmap for those wandering souls of the future.
The explorer’s neighbor, in contrast, was devoted to researching a material world that the other had renounced. To the researcher ↑, there was no need for self inquiry, as they couldn’t even see their own reflection in a mirror. ↑ treated themself as a disembodied perception device housed within a spartan studio, devoid of most embellishment. Where the explorer wandered by day, the researcher wandered by night, feeling themself drawn towards a sky brimming with constellations that beckoned in an ethereal chorus to be known. A person of modest means, ↑ eventually placed their available resources into a telescope that allowed ↑ to view our moon.
Before long, the researcher had stumbled on something moving across their remote view. The image was fuzzy, but the phenomena was unmistakable – there was something up there bumbling across the moon’s surface. Initially ↑ likened the movements to undersea detritus, being wafted about by the unusual gravity of the environment. But ↑ pushed past that deceptive rationale, continually examining recorded footage, and returning to their telescope to study the pattern unfolding. Confines of their village had the researcher convinced that ↑ existed to commune with a mysterious force they found out there. From certain angles the detritus being knocked around seemed to come from a terrible crash, giving them the gnawing sensation that they’d stumbled on remnants of a conspiracy. ↑ continued to watch regardless, for they were receiving some language from space through these lunar arrangements. So they took every chance to listen, and most crucially, to understand. Sometimes ↑ believed they saw an N, other times a Z, but maybe it was 2? The researcher worked night after night to untangle every possibility. Did ↑ see a t or was it a + that night? Was that a 0 or an O? Those who caught a glimpse of the researcher remarked their body had become slight from their observational work, though ↑ claimed to be brimming with vitality. On their increasingly rare outings ↑ would drift in a way that resembled their subject’s weightlessness, as if set in motion on some invisible track through the streets. It is said that in the end, ↑ was lifted into the cosmos that called for them one fateful night, finally merging with the cool grey surface they scoured for clues, leaving only their telescope and recordings for the code breakers to come.
Lives lived in service of a dream are never wasted as long as the barrier between what is, and what could be, is exhaustively challenged. For it is only through struggle that the dreams we foster may strengthen enough to supplant the demiurgical systems which lay claim to our world. Fragments of what is real are hidden throughout all of our existence. Some believe the pieces are nestled within our hearts, but others find them sparkling amidst the terrain of hillsides and distant shores. Who’s to say which discovery is most authentic or useful? The only way to know is by bringing your findings together and watching for the current to pass through, enlivening everything with meaning for a glorious moment.
Viktor Timofeev (b. 1984, Riga) is a New York–based artist holding a BA from Hunter College in New York, and an MA from the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, Netherlands. In 2018, he founded No Moon, an event space in Brooklyn hosting film screenings, performances, sensory deprivation listening sessions, and other diverse events. He has held multiple solo exhibitions, including Other Passengers at the National Museum of Art, Riga (2025); Pedagogical Games 1: Agents and Boundaries at Gallery 427, Riga (2024); DOG at Interstate Projects, New York (2021); and God Objects at Karlin Studios / Futura, Prague (2020). Recent group exhibitions include the 1st Klaipėda Biennial: Sunset Every Two Years (2025); the 19th Tallinn Print Triennial (2025); Patience (Game) at Malmö Art Museum, Sweden (2025); Breaking the Joints at Sapieha Palace, Vilnius (2025); Intercession CSS Bard at the Hessel Art Museum, New York (2025); Signals Intelligence at eyesneversleep, New York (2025); New Address: Eden at Kim?, Riga (2024); and Tallinn Photomonth (2023), among others.
The exhibition is funded by the Lithuanian Council for Culture and Vilnius City Municipality.
