“Thus the gift of art is the most original gift, because it is the gift of the original site of man. The work of art is neither a cultural ‘value’ nor a privileged object for the spectators, nor the absolute creative power of the formal principle; instead it situates itself in a more essential dimension, because it allows man to attain his original status in history and time in his encounter with it.”

— Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content

How does art belong to history? To raise this question immediately presents us with a problem: the problem of history itself. Sofiia Yesakova might have an answer to this problem, as demonstrated throughout her expansive body of work. Scavenging the ruins of the present for archeological fragments bearing the traces of war, dislocation, and the collapse of memory, Yesakova has created a distinctly monumental and spiritual form of art-making, constructing sites of remembrance at which to critically examine temporality and history. The notion of the memorial appears throughout Yesakova’s practice as an operative function, a methodology by which to convert the halls of galleries and museums into temporary zones of contemplative meditation. These are spaces in which our relation to time is radically altered, and where the signage and symbology of religion, technology, and military logistics dance freely, presenting themselves to us in an almost occultic manner. What Yesakova is working with is revelation, conjuring magical landscapes dotted by historical ephemera that work to reconfigure and ground the present. These spaces contain an awareness of twenty-first-century history and the fundamentally disjointed character which defines it, existing as places of reverence for an irreverent age and holy sites for an unholy time.

What distinguishes her practice, however, from a pure expression of nostalgia is a deliberate adoption of the transience of the present in service of a radical envisioning of worlds beyond our own. Yesakova’s work speaks with precision in a universal tongue, carefully incorporating the language of the present in order to best construct strategies for its subversion. We can see this demonstrated in The Flow, wherein the visual trappings of cartography are reduced to subtle, monochromatic markings similar to that of geological terrain or a topographical survey. The viewer is thus situated within an aerial perspective like that of a drone pilot, a theme further explored by Yesakova within the series War landscape in the optic of icons, which shifts from allegorical implication into explicit direction of viewership through a military lens. In the War landscape series, we are forced into direct confrontation with technology through our experience of sight becoming inseparable from technology itself, an encounter further complicated through the evocation of Christian iconography in the painted cross-hairs. Despite the symbolism within the pieces, our encounter with these works is neither entirely divine nor entirely debased. Rather, War landscape exists within a zone of indeterminacy that embraces the cloud of unknowing, positioning itself at once as an affair as mystical as it is critical. Yesakova utilizes the canvas as a means by which to dramatize and investigate the underlying structures of contemporary society, dissecting its code with a precision not unlike the machinery it unravels. It is within these works that the tensions between technology, humanity, and divinity are visualized in full form through a series of charred red vignettes bearing witness to the apocalypse.

Crucial to these works is the manner by which they suspend and dismember time, presenting us with a chain of images permanently frozen at the moment of impact. Such a presentation effectively traps the spectator, locking our gaze into that of machinic warfare while structuring our perception according to the dictates of technology. Through its formal properties, War landscape succeeds at commanding an audience relation, placing us within scenes of violence on eternal playback, offering no absolvement for sin except through divine redemption, allegorized through the double meaning of the cross within the works as a symbol of both damnation and salvation. There is an iconoclastic impulse within these works, one that Yesakova expresses here by rendering the image of the cross as a sign of both life and death, a paradoxical arrangement illustrative of the tension between technology and grace at the heart of her practice. This iconoclasm, however, is counterposed by the deeply iconographic character War landscape also possesses, a simultaneous display of two contrasting signs possessing drastically opposing significations. Underlying this opposition is a religiosity, one that positions itself as a restorational, sacred force in defiance of technological nihilism. One is reminded of the famous, late Martin Heidegger interview conducted in 1966 by Der Spiegel, in which the sudden arrival of a god is postulated as the only true escape from the clutches of Gestell. For Heidegger, even philosophy has been rendered obsolete by the totalizing nature of cybernetics, and therefore, it is only through the unexpected advent of a final god that we might be rescued. “The only possibility available to us,” Heidegger states, “is that by thinking and poetizing we prepare a readiness for the appearance of a god, or for the absence of a god in [our] decline, insofar as in view of the absent god we are in a state of decline.”¹ This decline is from where Yesakova positions her practice, formulating a methodology by which to closely examine the conflict between technology and the ever-possible appearance of a god. These twin polarities are engaged by allowing for their simultaneous existence within singular compositions, creating art that explicitly functions through dialectical conflict. Rarely, if ever, is this conflict shown to be resolved in Yesakova’s body of work, a choice which, through its denial of closed interpretation, challenges the audience to think beyond the limits of narrative linearity and actively partake in the making of meaning.

It is in the Altar in a modern context series that this aim is articulated most clearly. Here, the spiritual, “poetizing” impulse towards god-readiness is demonstrated in its most explicit form yet. Harkening back to the gray monochromes of The Flow, the small squares of Altar form appendages to the sleek, metallic sheen of the centerpieces. Scratched onto these central works are a set of small engineering calculations which amplify the cold, quasi-brutalist exteriors of the pieces. Reminiscent of the minimalist sculptures of Donald Judd and Robert Morris, the central works of the series exhibit a distinctly industrial sensibility evocative of international supply chains and global manufacturing.

However, just as in War landscape, this tendency is counteracted through a secondary nature, one concerning itself deeply with matters of the soul and seeking to saturate space with meditative reverence. Through this double meaning, Yesakova makes a direct intervention into the structure of cybernetic society by negating the utility of its tools. The mechanical calculations that have been inscribed on the surface of the centerpiece are markings possessing no functional value, an aesthetic gesture which pointedly assaults the possibility of compartmentalization within any informational system. Through a deliberate inversion of operative purpose, Altar serves as a guide to actualizing our readiness for the advent of a god through the dismantling of Gestell. Yesakova has emptied out the already hollow signifiers of technology in order to clear a space for the descent of the heavens to the Earth and, in this way, position her artistic practice as a means by which to activate history.

A crucial distinction, however, must be drawn between memory and history, as this relation forms a central problem within Yesakova’s aesthetic system.

Writing on her own work, she states:

“Memorials do not preserve memory, they formalise 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.”²

One noteworthy theme touched upon here is Yesakova’s problematization of trapping memory within material objects. Such a movement, in her eyes, is the calcification of history within a static enclosure, an enclosure that can be used as justification for any number of oppressive ends. Because of this, the monumentality within her works is always angled towards an opening, rather than a closing, of history. In this way, Yesakova operates through absence. The lack of containment within her work is a means by which to relay the faintest traces of information to the viewer while denying the possibility of their capture by technological systems in advance; Yesakova is whispering the loudest of matters to us in the most hushed of tones. The radical openness of these works transmits its content to us by what it lacks, not merely by what it contains. In the simplest sense, such a decision is a means by which to carefully deconstruct the materiality of a site of memory in order for its immaterial and truly historical character to break through. By rejecting the demand for the objectification of memory, Yesakova has, almost paradoxically, liberated memory from the prison of the corporeal world and restored its role as a form of metaphysical cognition. No longer confined by the limitations of objects, memory can once more exist as a transcendental means by which we might ground ourselves firmly within the waves of history. It is here that the double impulse towards both iconoclasm and iconography within Yesakova’s work once again takes center stage. By shattering the images of the present, an older, primordial, pre-modern, and religious drive towards expression mediated by way of holy image is reconstructed, one that carries with it an explicitly spiritual function cutting straight through the heart of nihilism. Absence, in such works, is a fundamental component in the salvation of man, a method of encryption by which to carefully communicate in ways undetectable by the systems of cybernetic management. In the lack of directly articulated meaning, we regain an enhanced capacity for the exchange of knowledge in higher forms. The interrogation of memory’s objectification also contains an implicit criticality, one that, similar to the questioning of materiality, expresses a desire to disentangle memory from its exploitation and oppression by political forces. Yesakova’s works are, in effect, an attempt to envision history not merely as something which is received but something which is activated through ongoing critique and examination.

In one of Yesakova’s most recent works, Cargo 200: Experimental projections on surfaces, this critical engagement with history is strengthened through the addition of one new element: seriality. The title is derived from military jargon referring to the transportation of the bodies of those killed in combat, a process which necessitates the usage of specific materials such as zinc. Here, such materials have been repurposed by Yesakova as a means by which to better uncover the nature of contemporary warfare. The piece comprises several individual works, and its serial character of the piece allows us to visualize the atomization of modern army life. A central point of the series is to be found in the piece entitled Recollecting the Emptiness, in which we see a flat, gray structure, similar to the centerpiece in Altar by way of its metallic shine and frantic diagrammatic inscriptions. Lit from the back by a glowing red panel, one can make out faint similarities in the work to Marcel Duchamp’s canonical The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even, as well as the post-minimalist, opaque sculptures and installations of Trisha Donnelly. Like Duchamp, Yesakova has mounted an attack on the dictatorship of rationality and the violence which it has inflicted. Unlike Duchamp, however, Yesakova sees the solution as lying not within surrealist provocation but rather through a comprehensive, subtle, and nuanced form of critique organically developed through a firm grounding within historicity. Echoes of Dan Flavin’s light-based sculptures can also be seen in Recollecting, a decision which strengthens Yesakova’s deconstruction of machinery and its dominion over society. The red panel of the piece illuminates only one side of the work, the side which faces away from the audience. In doing so, the room in which the sculpture is installed becomes filled with an ambient wash of red, transforming the walls of the space into a cavernous sanctuary illuminated by the faint glow of the panel. Here, the monumentality present in Yesakova’s work reemerges once again as a means by which to activate and elevate consciousness through a dissection of “the problem of war perception, which is that our own consciousness can never share the level of consciousness of dying soldiers and vice versa”.³ The monumentality of Recollecting the Emptiness is demonstrated clearly in the imposing character of the piece, one that looms large over the audience not unlike a tombstone or cenotaph. Unlike such monuments, however, Recollecting explicates the political aspects implicit within its structure, directly materializing a critique through its formal and conceptual properties. History in these works is not something that can be taken for granted but rather an active process that necessitates mass involvement and investigation. A Benjaminian affair. Recollecting resists the reduction of its content to a mere visualization of historically decided facts; rather, the piece serves, like the other works within Yesakova’s oeuvre, as a functional way by which to pry open the gates of time, an artistic practice as critical as it is poetic. The refusal to solidify history within a singular object animates collective memory with a dynamism capable of navigating the present, infusing our relationship to time with an ability to more deeply immerse ourselves within it as something alive and real. By rejecting the demand to define history and memory as static, such work exists in bold opposition to the calculated and rational time of machine logic. As in her usage of the mathematical sketches etched onto the surface of Recollecting’s centerpiece, Yesakova’s practice defies the expectations of technological utilitarianism and seeks the cultivation of aesthetic experience to restore the sacred quality of time. What emerges throughout Yesakova’s practice is a distinct form of artistic production inseparable from historical consciousness. Our experience with her work is a confrontation not only with the residues of a world defined by conflict and loss but with the very question of what it means to remember in the most fundamental sense. Yesakova’s practice serves as a direct intervention into the making of temporal meaning, one that goes beyond passive spectatorship and directly involves its audience in creative participation. Unlike the traditional monument, Yesakova’s sculptures serve as liberatory investigations, sites of renewal that resist the institutional capture of memory through a carefully managed strategy of absence.

The iconography present in these works is a language reaching towards a radically opened form of communication, one that might eclipse the stratified signage of the technological society. In a society saturated by the total domination of images, Yesakova has created what is essentially a contemporary iconoclasm, one that simultaneously deconstructs the hegemonic pictorial regime while boldly envisioning a radically reconstructed new world. These works are as much restorational as they are revolutionary, seeking to build as much as they seek to destroy, an approach carefully employed through a tactical synthesis of enveloping absence and totalizing presence. Yesakova reactivates history and memory as real, living, and vital things, spaces, and planes in which the reign of Gestell might be halted, if only for a moment, and where art may once again dare to claim for us our place within history.