On March 10 at 19:00 at the Zverev Center of Contemporary Art there will be an art opening for the exhibition “The Hunt for the Soluble Fish.” The artists taking part are Lily Balasanova, Stasys Šakarvis, Jane Sharvina, Ksenia Shinkovskaya. Traces of memory and time, and fragile reality themes unite these pieces. The works employ techniques of collage, painting, pictorial photography, and felt sculpture. The exhibition will continue until March 15 2020.

There once lived an artist in the form of a human, or maybe a hunter in the form of a bird. His favourite pastime was sitting on the shore of factuality and dipping his head in the water when the air began to tremble. He had trouble breathing on the surface, but it was easy underneath the water surface. He tenderly fingered through golden sparkles in the dark of the whirlpool and came kept returning to the shore to pull up his catch of magic. The more he collected, the easier it became to breathe above water. Eventually he began to sculpt the layers of consciousness on the shore – out of liquid gas, from cotton and moss, vapour and sand and hay, wet paper and dirt and coloured glass…

“Birds lose their form after they lose their colours.” – Andre Breton, “The Soluble Fish”.

In 1924 Andre Breton wrote the first “Manifesto of Surrealism”. Alongside it he published a fantasmagorical poem called “The Soluble Fish”. Surrealists worked through the paths of absurdism, and now we live our normal layered lives, and have even gotten used to peeking into them.

The hunt itself is as absurd as the quoted work, but the artists invite the sensitive viewer to pick at the granular surface of reality to glance at the underside.