Admission
Tickets may be purchased at the gallery
General Admission — 200 RUB
Concession — 100 RUB
public program
Anna Nova Gallery presents a solo exhibition by St. Petersburg–based artist Sasha Kokacheva, entitled “It’s a Trap. This Place Is Nowhere, and It’s Forever.” Through this project, Kokacheva deepens her inquiry into the nature of time, memory, and nostalgia, interrogating the mechanisms through which these constructs shape our experience and perception of reality.
The exhibition’s title is a quotation from the 1979 British science-fiction series Sapphire & Steel — resonated profoundly with cultural theorist Mark Fisher, who repurposed it as a critical metaphor in his seminal essay The Slow Cancellation of the Future. For Fisher, our present moment is characterized by a state of suspension: a kind of temporal limbo in which time appears to have stalled, yet curiously continues to unfold.
Kokacheva in her practices seeks to render this paradox perceptible. Her compositions, which draw from an archive of family photographs, feature figures divested of individual identity yet uncannily familiar — apparitions from a collective past, momentarily reanimated through memory. Anchoring the exhibition is a striking sculptural gesture: a chandelier, seemingly arrested mid-fall, as though having plunged through layers of time and space, now frozen at the threshold of impact. This image amplifies a sense of temporal dislocation, conjuring a dimension in which past, present, and future are no longer sequential but entangled.
Working across collage, pastel, charcoal, and aerosol paint, Kokacheva manipulates surface and medium to evoke fragmentation and continuity. Complementing these painterly works are engraved steel panels adorned with vintage motifs, as well as an installation constructed from suspended arrows — each element reinforcing the exhibition’s metaphysical undertones.
To enter this space is, in a sense, to surrender to its logic: to become ensnared in a present that hovers between an irretrievable past and a future that remains just out of reach.
