toys

Tatiana Akhmetgalieva

November 2 — November 14, 2012
Triumph gallery

A toy is a transitional object that is important for a child’s development. It helps to establish relationships with the outside world, to learn to distinguish between the inner and the outer. Although the founder of the theory of the transitional object, D. Vinnikot, believed that "the task of accepting reality remains unresolved to the end," he believed that thanks to a strong experience associated with art, religion, and the world of fantasy, a person still manages to free himself from the tension caused by the presence of internal and external reality.

In Tatiana Akhmetgalieva’s "Toys," "transitivity" takes on a metaphorical character. Firstly, the plot often becomes such events when the external reality is in question. Secondly, the artist immerses us in the boundary zone between the inner and the outer, as many of her works are associated with memories and artifacts of her own childhood.

Farewell vom arbeitsamarkt
2012
A frame from the video

In Tatiana Akhmetgalieva’s "Toys," "transitivity" takes on a metaphorical character. Firstly, the plot often becomes such events when the external reality is in question. Secondly, the artist immerses us in the boundary zone between the inner and the outer, as many of her works are associated with memories and artifacts of her own childhood.

Akhmetgalieva grew up in the city of Kemerovo in Western Siberia. Her childhood fell during the time of perestroika, when there were drastic changes in the economic, political, and aesthetic order, when the new and the old existed together in a kind of phantasmagoric reality. Images of paper dolls in the "Paper" animation flash by in a rapid change of symbolic orders. Sexy Western beauties compete with infantile Nastya and Katya, who have remained unchanged for decades.

The new characters who flooded into the former USSR, from Barbie and Ken to the teenage mutant ninja turtles, overlapped with the story from the ABC about the mother who washed Masha and washed the frame. When the external reality was instantly transformed, there was only one way to accept it — to draw it and thus make it a part of oneself. Some dolls were bought and cut out of paper, others were finished.