Admission is by ticket, available for purchase at the Gallery.
Full-price ticket — 200 rubles
Discounted ticket — 100 rubles
Anna Nova Gallery presents the international project of artist Ilya Fedotov-Fedorov, “Second Skin”. The exhibition will include sculptures and paintings created by the artist in New York over the past two years. It is curated by the independent Korean curator Sungah Serena Choo and the art historian Ksenia Chilingarova, founder of Badlon magazine.
The project is based on the artist’s personal experience: his childhood years were spent in hospital due to a rare kidney disease, which shaped his lasting sense of bodily dissociation, otherness and fragility. Ilya explores these themes through fabric — a soft, pliable material that mimics the body's natural covering while belonging to industrial culture. Fabric evokes feelings of warmth and care, yet it is still a product created by a machine. It is precisely this gap between the material's real properties and the meanings endowed upon it that forms the project's central axis of tension.
The key materials Ilya works with, fleece and leather, are metaphors for the body, memory, and trauma. The artist often uses fragments of his own clothes. In his sculptures, fabric replaces the face, becoming a new epidermis and surface of identity. His works refer to the idea of social masks as mechanisms of adaptation. The mask ceases to be a means of concealment and becomes a means of existing within the system, a source of protection, and simultaneously provides an opportunity for recognition.
Within the framework of the project, Ilya Fedotov-Fyodorov applies French philosopher Michel Foucault's ideas, considering clothes and fabric as instruments of institutional and social control. In hospitals, the softness of lab coats, bed sheets and uniforms coexists with discipline. 'Fleece is part of this logic.' His softness is standardized. Its warmth is replicable. It envelops the body while simultaneously shaping its form', says the artist.
The exhibition 'The Second Skin' is designed as a transition space between the external and the internal. During this transition, the fabric becomes a semi-permeable membrane between the body and the system.
