"Dream catchers, or UMTTN", Sigmund Freud's Dreams Museum, Saint-Petersburg

Liza Morozova (born 1973) is not only a famous artist (Venice Biennale 2005 with ESCAPE group, Prague Biennale 2003, Moscow Biennale 1 and 2), but also a professional psychologist, PhD, assistant professor, lecturer at Institute for Analytical Psychology and Psychoanalysis (Moscow), practicing original method "performance-art-therapy".
For Lisa, dreams are constant and usual material for both artistic and psychological research. This particular exhibition explores phenomena of memory, visualizing it in the form of a knot. The knot grabbed Lisa's attention as a peculiar form, representing the unity of memory and meaning, rooted in culture as a special practice.

"Art of knots" resembles dream catchers, which American Indians hung above their beds to protect from bad dreams and dark forces – these are the woven nooses for strange and obscure meanings of the artist's nostalgic past, for specters of the unconscious. Objects created out of hoops and skipping-ropes, with many knots, resemble somehow these famous souvenirs of American Indians. They concentrate, condense and catch rememberings, materializing now inactive, yet author's treasured telephone numbers of the dear people (the off abbreviation in the name of the work refers to the famous Mandelstam's line "I Got Your Phone Numbers"). As a part of this exhibition, Lisa also demonstrates photographs of her "The knot of the matter" performance (2007), where she made knots with the boiled pasta, which resembled magic signs (Lisa calls them her "personal drawings").
At the exhibition one can also see and discuss works of Lisa's performance-art-therapy groups students.

1570676. Wherever I was, I called this subscriber every evening, at 9 pm exactly, until I was 26 years. She could not sleep without talking to me. She was strong though, once small-bore rifle shooting world champion. Her husband was executed in 1937, and she left with two small kids. She nearly reached 90 herself. Left me her flat, though I could not get it for reasons beyond our control…

9522006. I became artist thanks to this subscriber. He died before my first personal exhibition. Many artists called him their guru and friend, and still all of them disappeared when he fell ill… His house and the place where we worked disappeared by now.

Dream: Standing at the mountain top, I look above the sea. Sky is pinky, it's dawn. None around. I am standing one foot, hands stretched. It's getting harder to keep standing. I know I will fall soon, rolling from the mountain into the sea and die. Yet I am happy, knowing it is my performance called "I love".

1453474. This subscriber opened her veins in 1996. By then, I had moved to Saint-Petersburg to do fine arts. We used to study psychology together, both loved orange color. She had photomodel's features and face of a saint. She loved to sing to the stars and made friends with prostitutes. In science, she studied catharsis. We did not have time to even become friends. I left psychology for ten years, so that I did not see her personal therapist.

1453474. This subscriber left Russia for good. Graduated from Sorbonne and one of the States' best art schools, he returned home but could not learn giving bribes to cops, getting used to grim faces, or hiding his sexual orientation. He was the first whom I wanted to make a collaborative project with… I think he is my alter ego.

…In my dream this subscriber gave me philosophers' stone.