Keep Yourself Clean: the first programmatic exhibition by VOLNА

"Keep Yourself Clean" is the first retrospective exhibition by VOLNA and presents a virtual reconstruction of our major works from 2016 to the present. The exhibition spaces and installations were created using video game development tools (Unreal Engine) that simulate real-time scenes and lighting effects. We invite you to immerse yourself in the surroundings of each installation, move freely in the rooms and choose any observation point.

This online exhibition represents the first time our zeal for pragmatic production processes is reflected in a simulated world. For this reason, only works that were realized in the material world were selected for display.

The primary expressive element in our work is light and its various characteristics, its movement and interaction with space, the rhythm of chiaroscuro and the way chiaroscuro scenarios unfold in relation to time. Some works include synchronized sound, created to interact closely with the light’s dramaturgy.

The virtual exhibition space itself is heterotopic and at the same time proportional to the original exhibition locations. We made the model exhibits displayed inside as close as possible to their real prototypes and preserved the original structural details, including the nature of the lighting and scenarios behind each of the live installations. The original sound design and ambient sound environments are reproduced, and each work’s context and theme are discussed in an accompanying text.

The exhibition illustrates how real space can live according to its own laws in another (virtual) space, as well as the merging of virtual and real spaces, a synthesis of various methods for transmitting information and the interplay between them. As media historian Norbert Bolz once put it, in media reality “thematically structured visual worlds are supposed to bring a surreal condensation of the experience: more real than reality.”

Accepting this challenge, the exhibition "Keep Yourself Clean" attempts to embrace all the real and virtual layers of information that make up each of the works, and then let the works themselves become the determinants of perception. With their help, each of the contexts will “re-sort” in the virtual world, rethink the laws of perception, and each work will, in turn, become an experience of sensory contemplation. We hope this experience will be personal and genuine for each viewer.