Syntax Gallery is pleased to present a new solo project by Lidia Zhudro – Widerstandserlebnis / The Experience of Resistance.

"Raising dust. Kindly show respect."

In this appeal Marcel Duchamp made to the first viewers (his friends) of The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass, 1915–1923), concern preceded irony, and it was not so much the author’s labor that demanded respect as the material itself. The irony was in the fact that Duchamp asked only time for time’s approved physical embodiment—dust. In the new century and under new living conditions—both in life and in the life of art, which has become accustomed to a diversity of mediums—dust still asserts its right to presence, to space entrusted to it for life, and to the speed at which that life is created. All of this is explored with patient respect in Lidia Zhudro’s new body of work, Widerstandserlebnis, which sees in dust not only a trace of time but also its legacy—experience.

Dust, the ever-uninvited yet faithful companion of human life, framing every turn of it and calmly following all its uneven paths, forms not so much a material as a conceptual background in Lidia’s work. It leads us to reflect on the Geisteswissenschaften (“sciences of the spirit”) of Wilhelm Dilthey. The principle coined by the idealist philosopher—“the experience of resistance”—is defined through the fluid, attentive outlines of Lidia’s practice. This time, the outline is composed entirely of objects and carefully covered with a soft coat of dust—a polyphonic sign of both their protection and their vulnerability.

Objects—both created and found—are coated with or contain dust—equally created or “discovered,” collected. These pairings become a totemic vessel of the “spirit” whose “sciences” the artist studies, while simultaneously offering an empirical portrait of a nascent thought that overcomes diverse resistances amidst the fog of doubt and confusion before it takes true form. Whether it’s the resistance of an eraser against a sheet of paper (Totem), wood against sandpaper (Poetry of Uncertainties), a scalpel against photographic pigment (Memento), or airflow against a filtering device (Vent), the meticulous labor of the objects and the artist who wields them contests the finality of form—and thus, the finality of thought. There is none—just as there is neither beginning nor end in the tightly coiled snail shell of the work Utopia, which doesn’t allow us to read a single line from the Nietzschean legacy of Zarathustra, no matter how many languages it’s printed in. The limit of thought is impossible, form is mutable and therefore indomitable, infinite—because infinite are the particles that fill it, the words that formulate it.

John Ruskin, one of the first to publicly marvel at “the elegant whims of which dust is capable,” also rightfully acknowledged the creative power of these “whims”—their endless mutability, capable of producing the strongest and most beautiful materials. We read and look at the “sacred stones” of office rubber in Totem, worn down by labor and time; at the radiographs of sandpapered souls in Poetry of Uncertainties, glowing with a grainy shimmer. And when we look at the clustered arrangement of the columbarium of colorful vials in Memento, once a grid of phone gallery photos, we follow Lucretius’s wisdom and remember that “nothing comes from nothing” and “nothing ever perishes.”

Anastasia Aleshkovskaya