Viktor Timofeev at Interstate Projects

Artist: Viktor Timofeev

Exhibition title: DOG

Venue: Interstate Projects, New York, US

Date: March 5 – April 11, 2021

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Interstate Projects, New York

Interstate Projects is pleased to present DOG by Viktor Timofeev, an installation of colored pencil drawings, a mural, and a self-playing game; all arranged within a fictionalized bureaucratic setting.

Within the drawings, figures writhe above architectural plans, their bodies stacking together to form shapes loosely evoking recognizable infrastructures. The three channel self-playing game, Chat, presents an automated questionnaire being executed by two digital avatars: an asker and an answerer. Beginning with the Roman alphabet, the glyphs on two tabletop monitors are systematically scrambled, quickly mutating beyond recognition. Hanging overhead, a third screen displays the same alphabet arranged around a clock face, its hands illustrating the process of encryption in real time. Stuck in a loop, the dialogue is effectively robbed of its potential for true interactivity: one of the accompanying keyboards is broken, and the other has a single key jammed. The game is left to play itself, endlessly feeding identical responses to increasingly illegible questions. DOG appears to have been abandoned by its users, whose abrupt departure is frozen in time.

Viktor Timofeev (b. 1984 Riga, Latvia) is currently living and working in New York. Timofeev has recently had solo exhibitions at MX Gallery in New York, Karlin Studios in Prague, kim? Contemporary Art Center in Riga and Alyssa Davis Gallery in New York. Group exhibitions include The Latvian National Museum of Art in Riga, Den Frie in Copenhagen, Stroom Den Haag in The Hague and Bozar in Brussels.