Cargo 200

Experimental projections on surfaces

Is it possible to fill the gaps created by the lack of answers to some of history’s questions?

“The subject hastens to fill these gaps with appropriate ideas, sometimes even with pieces of the mosaic that do not fit.”

— Jacques Lacan.

War memorials give the impression of something depressing and coldly detached, yet they have regained relevance in the context of disputes among various groups over history, over who is remembered, and how. The working surface of Cargo 200. Experimental projections on surfaces. 5.1 is prepared using techniques from icon painting, yet without specific iconographic images, only schemes, as if the structure of faith remains, but the content has fled. This installation reflects on the phenomenon of war as a whole, not merely on current conflicts.

Evil is always “the other”. One would never use such a word to describe oneself.

But evil is not outside us. It is sedimented in our silences, embedded in our omissions, in the rituals of forgetting we mistake for healing. Memorials do not preserve memory, they formalize oblivion, dressing amnesia in marble and symmetry. We mourn only to forget more elegantly. What begins as commemoration ends in abstraction, and abstraction becomes justification. The scheme without image, the icon without God. This is modern memory. A hollow liturgy of grief repeated to assure ourselves we are not complicit. We are. We always are. We turn memory into form. We give suffering a shape so that it becomes bearable. But form is a way of disarming horror. The icon without a face, the memorial without pain, the text without a scream—all of them are attempts to domesticate the unbearable. Symbols that once served as consolation now function as barriers. Not to remember, but to not come too close. The schemes etched onto the wood do not pray, and they do not accuse. They are silent. And silence, repeated a thousand times, becomes a system.

Cargo 200

Sofiia Yesakova, Cargo 200. Experimental projections on surfaces. 5.1., 2023, acrylic, gesso, gelatin and wooden board, 200 × 100 × 8 cm, courtesy of the artist.

Cargo 200

Sofiia Yesakova, Cargo 200. Experimental projections on surfaces. 5.1., 2023, detail, acrylic, gesso, gelatin and wooden board, 200 × 100 × 8 cm, courtesy of the artist.

Cargo 200

Sofiia Yesakova, Cargo 200. Experimental projections on surfaces. 5.1., 2023, detail, acrylic, gesso, gelatin and wooden board, 200 × 100 × 8 cm, courtesy of the artist.

Cargo 200

Sofiia Yesakova, Cargo 200. Experimental projections on surfaces. 5.1., 2023, acrylic, gesso, gelatin and wooden board, 200 × 100 × 8 cm, courtesy of the artist.

Cargo 200

Sofiia Yesakova, Cargo 200. Experimental projections on surfaces. 5.1., 2023, detail, acrylic, gesso, gelatin and wooden board, 200 × 100 × 8 cm, courtesy of the artist.

Cargo 200

Sofiia Yesakova, Cargo 200. Experimental projections on surfaces. 5.1., 2023, detail, acrylic, gesso, gelatin and wooden board, 200 × 100 × 8 cm, courtesy of the artist.

Cargo 200

Sofiia Yesakova, Cargo 200. Experimental projections on surfaces. 5.1., 2023, detail, acrylic, gesso, gelatin and wooden board, 200 × 100 × 8 cm, courtesy of the artist.

Sofiia Yesakova

Sofiia Yesakova lives and works in Berlin. In 2024 she participated in the Berlin postgraduate program Goldrausch Künstlerinnen. Yesakova is a member of Frontviews at HAUNT Berlin, where she is also part of the curatorial board.

 

Central to Yesakova’s artistic practice is the research into the increasing role of information in regulating and controlling human behavior—being able as it is to rapidly adapt to any situation and reduce everything to statistics. A search for truth in a stream of interference.

 

Yesakova uses diagrams or engineering-like schematic drawings to arrive at an alternative form of artistic narrative. Bureaucratically consistent, dry, and lifeless. She often refers to theoretical concepts like Gilles Deleuze’s layering approach of thinking, Jacques Lacan’s analysis of society’s structures, and Giorgio Agamben’s biopolitical concepts.
 

Website: https://sofiiayesakova.com/
Instagram: @sofiia.yesakova