Special project of the 6th Ural Industrial Biennale of Contemporary Art - Create a new layer, Tobolsk, 2021.

The project, which unites two cities - Tyumen and Tobolsk - refers to the team of the Photoshop program, where, by adding pixel layers, you can create a three-dimensional reality for every taste. The exhibition in Tyumen and the installation in Tobolsk are dedicated to the study of the relationship between modern man and space - personal, social, urban, digital. How do we feel in space when the city and its buildings remain only the background of our daily movements, social interactions are limited by instant messengers, and contemporary art practices are directed towards the viewer, overcoming the usual framework of a museum, a flat wall, or traditional media.

Our daily movements, touches, and interactions with each other are limited by familiar routes, regulated by rules, passed through the prism of contactless communications on the network. Traveling from point A to point B, we often do not notice what surrounds us at that moment, not realizing ourselves, our bodies in this cycle of different layers of reality. Familiar urban spaces inside and outside remain in the gray zone of our attention, just like our bodies.

An installation by artist Ekaterina Sokolovskaya, specially created for the Tobolsk project, creates a space where sculptures with tactilely varied surface shapes provide the opportunity to interact with them: touch, sit, slide. This focuses attention on movement and offers new possibilities for the body to exist in familiar conditions. The Invisible Touch project draws attention to the body in everyday life, to touch that is now limited by social distance, to the objects and materials from which they are composed, as an opportunity to encounter the other.

Paradoxically, the artist’s large-scale objects are directed as much as possible at the viewer, speaking to him about his own bodily sensations from the surrounding space. Contrasting as much as possible with the usual reality, bright colored sculptures from the artist’s imagination, as if inserted into reality using a graphics editor program, emphasize the historical architecture of the ensemble of government warehouses, highlight the contrast of modern artificial materials, neon light, abstract forms and traditional brickwork, the white Kremlin walls of the old Tobolsk.

You need to forget about everything you thought about art before, about its inviolability, copying reality, the obligation to tell you a story. Instead, the installation speaks of contemporary sculpture and abstract art. Objects, like patients in private rooms, visitors at a massage therapist, first of all contextualize our presence in the environment created by fabric, light, sound and material. One on one with the object, which was also created through touch, connecting modern sculpture with traditional applied art, where the main thing is manual practice, deep interaction with the material.

Come closer, touch, instead of the usual - “keep your distance”, “don’t touch”. With the help of fabrics, pink light, sound, even the hospital smell upon entering, the total installation affects all senses. The installation - a “secret room” about our presence in space, creates a new layer of perception of the mysterious building in the historical center of Tobolsk, talking about the new tasks of art today.