"The creator of the work, Aleksander Komarov, tossed his Belarusian passport on the scales and thus established its weight, the 35 grammes mentioned above. This work of art appropriately reminds us of a parascientific experiment, in which, more than a century ago, an American doctor had tried to find proof for the existence of the soul. Weighing people at the moment of their deaths, he established that they lost a certain amount of weight. According to Dr. Duncan McDougall measurements, the average weight loss was 21 grammes or, to be more exact, between 8 and 35 grammes. As a result, he concluded that this must be the weight of the human soul, which, as we know, is supposed to be immortal. the soul must then have a material dimension, it must, therefore, also be quantifiable. His hypothesis was, of course, quickly discredited; the recorded difference in weight, which could also be measured in animals, for example mice, was traced to a banal, yet completely rational, cause, namely the loss of fluid that happens at the moment of death. Water, and not the soul, weighed 21 grammes. Nevertheless, it still makes sense, even today, to remember this “experiment”. despite its miserable failure, it was guided by logic; by a blind belief in rational, scientific jurisdiction over not only everything that exists, but also over everything that can be conceived or imagined. the idea that we could take the soul, that most sublime part of a human being, and toss it on the scales like a piece of meat, was far from being just the fantasy of a freak. The hypothesis, that the soul possessed materiality and could be mechanically quantified, was absolutely in tune with the spirit of the time. this was the epoch of the first great upsurge of industrial modernism, belief in its unstoppable progress had not yet been tarnished by global crisis or world war.

With 35G, Komarov reflects up on and documents the conditions of his own work as an artist. More exactly, he assesses it using the tried and tested criteria for the rationalisation of industrial work, the time wasted and the money squandered in obtaining residency permits and transit visas - in order to expose the control mechanisms to which his movements, the movements of a working artist, are subjected, exposing himself as a cognitive proletarian in the global art and culture market, bound by the chains of its identity-based control mechanisms. In other words, it is his identity, a soul breathed in from that reality. Identity is, after all, nothing more than soul at work, and Komarov has exactly measured it. It weighs 35 grammes."

https://aleksanderkomarov.com/work/81rlKR1lwH7VuXFf6TRO