"The Knot of the Matter"
Performance, installation.

Concept: This particular performance and installation are parts of my larger project. Realised in 2006-07, it investigates a phenomenon of femenine memory, visualised through the form of small knot. Personal exhibition at "Belka&Strelka" gallery (St.Petersburg, Nov.2006) successfully started this project.

In my view, the knot is a very peculiar form, showing the unity of memory and meaning, and rooted in our culture as a special practice. I remember my grand-grandmother: illiterate, she used knotting as a means to document and, at the same time, to structure and study her life, like a kind of a diary, organiser and even a simple calculator.

The entire day of the exhibition opening, I am patiently doing a variety of knots, using boiled noodles to create an abstract "picture", reminding in its monochromatic rhythmic structure a kind of writing. These constellations of meaning-knots weave a unity of "now-here" and the past, of living and reflection, of female paranoia and a means to get through it - all this arise before the viewers, who can also join my labours.

This performance works with my personal history, and important event to be mentioned is participation in a Venice Biennale (2005). It is not accidentally that noodles became a material of choice for knotting. My woman's memory of Italy is directly linked to noodles. To knot noodles thus is to work with this important and equally painful experience.

At the same time, this project remains critical to the existing system of contemporary art. "To noodle someone" is a common Russian idiom, meaning "to string someone along", so this performance is derisive and self-ironic.

Project description: Three long black cardboard strips, 1 meter wide, hang on the three walls of the exposition box. Two plastic strings stretched in the middle of every strip 30 cm apart each other.

There is an electrical oven in the middle of the box. Noodles are being cooked in a huge bowl. Artist starts the performance 1-2 hours beforehand the exhibition opening, so that about a quarter of the space is covered with knotted noodles when first visitors arrive. Noodles change their appearance with time: white and supple while being hanged, they grow yellower and thinner, reminding strings. These metamorphosis are also part of the visual component of the project.

Press: "Noodles squared" (S.Khachaturov, News Time, 28; 16 February 2007)
…among those (applications for the "Art-Moscow Workshops" - L.M.) one is memorable, though. It is a project by Liza Morozova, member of ESCAPE group. This work is an explicitly vernacular interpretation of subjects such as gender and femenism. The thing is, Liza is to create an abstract canvas by knotting the traditional russian noodles. Macaroni meaning-knots constellations become a silent evidence of various cultural meanings, illustrating not leastly the difficult lot of a woman (such labour is hell hard!) Liza's project is also charming for its honest utterance: contemporary art, denying its inability or reluctance to speak of life audibly and interestingly, often becomes a practice of elegant "noodling" the audience (Russian idiom "to noodle someone", meaning "to string along" - L.M.)