"Dreamcatchers"

"Liza Morozova created a perfect plastic subject of the museum quality and an ideal vizualization of the time."
Haim Sokol

«Dreamcatchers», an installation

The artwork presented a long spiral made of  barbed wire installed along the walls of the gallery room with a thread with cranberries on it. On one of the walls the construction was interrupted with a diagonal line made of red beads remeniscent of the cranberries organized as a dashed line from left to right. There was an important visual effect creating a special atmosphere to the exhibition and the optics, fog produced by a smoke machine.Thanks to its effect the visitor had to approach the object closely in order to see it  better.

Conception: The installation “Dreamcatchers” is part of an exhibition by the same name presented as part of Liza Morozova’s project called “Knot moments” started in 2006. In this project the artist makes reference to the theme of memory, and to the knot-letters as a visualized form of an original female mnemo- and psychotechnics.
“What is a knot? A knot fixes a place of abruption, dehiscence or imitates this abruption. It is a memorial of what has been lost. When transferred on to the body where a real symptom is supposed to be, the knot becomes a scar or slash. A slash, a sicatrized place of a cut. A cut for memorizing. A memorial of the trauma. A slash appears where communication was abruptly ceased. The thicker the scar the more profound was the cut underneath, behind it, in the past,” –  E. Melnikova-Grigorjeva, Professor of semiotics - University of Tartu, press release.

The beaded berries visually remind of “memory knots” or a string of prayer beads that create a rhythm for the inner life of a person. So this string of “knots” is a utopic attempt to recreate the communication that was ceased, to eliminate the trauma of the past and the cultural gap.
The artist in her installation “Dreamcatchers” is trying to look into the future through the past. The foggy image of this future is more and more influencing our existance. The word “dreams” in this artwork should be understood broadly as nightdreams, reveries, phantasmas, hopes... Dragnets made of barbed wire not only catch the meanings and preserve our memories but also kill fatally our dreams, as does the reality of today.

Liza Morozova creates a polymeaningful image that provokes deeply personal associations with childhood, with New Year decorations (the exhibition opened just before the New Year’s Eve) but at the same time it points to the social realities of the contemporary world. By literally hanging the cranberries around the artist is working with the language, with the russian idiom “patulent cranberry”  alluding to the inadequate position of Russian art in the  West. On the other hand this image is also indicative to the condition of contemporary art in Russia itself, its inaccessibility, its subjection to censorship, and at the same time its elitism and self engagement with consumerism.

The theme of gender is interpreted in this artwork only in the local context. The constellations of berries is a witness of many cultural senses. Among them is the hard fate of women, painstaking thankless anonymous labour. But the beads of cranberries are also the simplest of women’s decoration and at the same time can be considered the “spinal cord”, although the artist indicates to the sensitivity and the relativity of the center and the perifery in the contemporary world.