Artist Talk: “Three Suns, Cloth, and Experience”

Boris Klyshnikov. I would like to begin by saying there are at least two sides to this topic. On one side is the institutional art world. We watch what happens in contemporary art and describe it in detached terms — somewhere something is happening. On the other side each of us has a direct lived experience of cloth and weaving.

At the exhibition you speak about the myth of three suns — we will come back to it. I am not only interested in comparing versions of the myth across traditions — in the Chinese tradition, for example, three suns do not appear and a different logic and different political conclusions arise. I want your interpretation. What are “three suns” for you. And can you recall your first childhood encounter with cloth or with the process of weaving. What did you feel. How would you link that experience with what is happening in art now.

We really do see textile, ceramics, and what I call spiritual abstraction becoming more important. For me these are not separate trends but something integral that runs between these practices. From a distanced view it may look like the usual change of fashions — there was a choreographic turn and now it is ceramics and textile. For me ceramics, textile, and spiritual abstraction are fundamental. I was shaken by them. I will later share my own childhood impressions.

Please tell us about your first perception of cloth.

Aysha Demina. Cloth has always been important to me, largely thanks to my mother. She could weave and when I was eleven or twelve she showed me how it is done. At home we had bags and fragments of fabric and she literally showed me how everything is braided together. I was struck that a thing I perceived as whole breaks down into many threads.

The second important point is the care that cloth holds. Cloth can protect and transform any space. When I traveled I took a scarf or a small piece of fabric with me. If I put it on a pillow or on the bed I felt more at home. It is a portable way to tint a space.

I still have a special, slightly nostalgic sensitivity to cloth. On those childhood fragments there were small patterns. Through touch they imprinted themselves in my memory.

If I move to the sun and childhood. I spent much of my childhood in a village and our daily life followed the sun. Sunrises and sunsets impressed me deeply. At the same time I have almost no tolerance for direct sun. I get heat strokes and burns very easily. I could not go outside at noon as a child because I could faint. It is a paradox. The sun gives life and makes everything grow, yet the same energy can be so strong that it makes me ill.

Boris Klyshnikov. In three suns what frightens us is excess. One sun is life. Two or three is an intensity that stops being alive and becomes scorching and dangerous. This links to cloth as protection — including protection from the sun. Formally the sun as a symbol in your works echoes those woven islands.

The sun is a point that pulls attention — a pause in movement. Around it there is a play of color spots as if you stare at light and then shift your gaze. Notice in that work the sun is made of metal. The sun is a source of light yet in your piece it swallows color while a blur spreads around it. This creates tension that fits the idea of three suns.

Tell us about the Chuvash myth. It is one of the best known. If you search for “three suns” it is the first that appears. What do those suns symbolize.

Aysha Demina. In short there is a tale called “Veshchiki velik.” Once there were three suns in the sky. There was constant day and constant summer and no night. People called a marksman to shoot and remove the excess suns. He shot. Two suns went dark and fell into the water. The third, frightened, moved farther from the earth. People asked the elders if this could be fixed. The answer was no. But in memory of the mistake we can depict three suns everywhere so that the remaining sun will see our regret. Since then the motif of three suns has entered many ornaments. The tale fires imagination and it also feels as if we still live inside it. In reality one sun shines, yet people keep depicting three.

Boris Klyshnikov. I am also interested in another aspect. One sun is one world. Yet thanks to oral tradition a person can hold three worlds at once — a world with three suns, with two, and with one. We step beyond the binary opposition of night and day. Weaving as a practice holds real history as part of symbolic history and the symbolic becomes equal to the natural.

When did you decide to become an artist. Was there a decision to do art at all. Or is it not about art.

Aysha Demina. For me creativity started as a childhood game and gradually became inseparable from my world. I think in images. Words are hard for me to memorize. I loved drawing. A game unfolded in my head — what happens on and inside the drawing. I liked learning new techniques — modeling, braiding, any hand practice through which my imagination could find new organic exits.

Then came a period of “fixing reality” — photography, directing, cinema. But the dissection of reality trained an unhealthy perfectionism. I returned to manual techniques and realized I wanted to weave.

There was also a hard personal crisis. I did not understand who I was or what I wanted to do. The search for meaning led me to fairy tales and escapism. My grandparents kept embroidery books. Holding them and looking at patterns made me feel better. Weaving made me feel better too. It came intuitively. Then I wanted to share the practice. I opened studios where I taught people to weave — often children from orphanages and those in difficult situations. It is life affirming. The process slows you down. It is often collective and meditative. And most of all from almost nothing a dense matter appears that can warm you, protect you, and create comfort.

Boris Klyshnikov. From the late nineteen eighties until very recently photography and video were the core of post conceptual art. They stitched shards of everyday life to the question of where the artwork begins and ends. You also shifted from photography to weaving. I had a similar turn. I loved video and photography and identified as a critic of post conceptual art. Then I felt it had run out of air. For me the break was in 2016. I will speak more about it in tomorrow’s lecture. It is also linked to war. Hard to talk about, yet true.

Many of my friends then turned to weaving as a therapeutic practice. Though in reality it is hard labor. There are cultures where weaving is not associated with women but with men because the work is heavy.

Through that crisis I became interested in music and in textile. I see many overlaps with DJing. You blend tracks, they layer, and you feel the seams and the body. When you weave something happens to time. It slows down, becomes saturated and bodily. Time flows from the body. In art historically the main impulse was the exit from time — the avant garde gesture to jump out. To show that a work can be made in one gesture. Music and weaving are not about a single gesture. As a critic I cannot see your pieces as isolated objects. They are one process.

Aysha Demina. I agree.

Boris Klyshnikov. The form shows it. Curves and motifs flow from color to color and overcome the discrete space of a modernist gallery. Fluid patterns appear that stitch the room together. The exhibition lives through this contradiction.

In the modernist tradition art lives itself. Weaving, ceramics, and spiritual abstraction bring us back into the time of the body.

Weaving is tightly connected to women’s labor, to the history of gender, and to capitalism. The first capitalist machine was the loom. The history of computing began with the automation of weaving through punched cards. Many art historians say our interest in weaving and ceramics now is a counterpoint to AI culture. It is a kind of counter AI. What do you think.

Aysha Demina. It is hard to say what can stand against AI images. What I do also comes from research — childhood patterns, Russian ornaments, my present feelings. For me it is a diary. I lay threads one by one, line by line. It is time and feeling. An AI image tries to imitate what already exists. Imitation of the past belongs to a colonial optic. It treats tradition as fixed canons that live in museums and must not be touched. In reality artisans in different villages and eras used different materials and palettes. Ornament always lived and evolved.

That is why I think my carpets will also belong to Chuvash tradition. I base my work on it and create something new. The process keeps the culture alive. AI reproduces what is taken as canonical and completed.

Boris Klyshnikov. That happens because of how AI currently works. It operates through words and concepts. You type a prompt. Weaving does not oppose language or consciousness. It offers another perspective on consciousness — embodied and durational rather than mimetic and representational. I ask myself what life is. I think life happens outside us. Something collides out there and our body registers the event rather than the object.

I am drawn to what I call a pointillist ontology. In pointillism one color meets another not in an object but inside perception. Separate dots coincide within us on the basis of the body. Looking at your tapestries we see dots that stop being dots and become the experience of their collisions.

Aysha Demina. That is why textile feels opposite to cinema. In video color always depends on light and the situation. Our eyes see a simplified mix. I do not take hundreds of colors. I combine threads in layers. In the plane of the tapestry the colors begin to shift. I aim for the effect of light on water. Something changes right now. I work with color perception.

As a child I lived near a place with an interesting collection of medieval textiles. The name sounded like “Zajicunor.” What I saw became a singular point for me. It looked like painting from the inside out. As if you are looking at a canvas from inside the canvas.

Boris Klyshnikov. There are symbolic images too. For example the sun. A symbol is almost a word yet woven into the outsideness of the world. I am interested in turning the familiar history of art inside out. This is also linked to imperialism. An empire does not simply show heritage. It appropriates. It adds to life a new object called emptiness. We cannot describe empire. It is like a dark hole that absorbs everything. The Louvre functions in the same way, as do other imperial states. What do we do with our lives and identities. We turn them inside out and reconnect with non verbal experience.

Aysha Demina. I feel how simple forms affect the mind. When I look at traditional ornaments a static image starts to move. I feel potential energy. It is a language I understand without concepts. I can look for a long time and sense meaning even if I cannot read it.

Boris Klyshnikov. This is the nourishing power of form. A curve is always singular and cannot be reduced to frequency. In your work I see a concept of empowerment. Not power as structure in Foucault’s sense but power as touching a live wire. Electricity. Solar energy. Vibration and saturation. I have been a depressive person. These shapes feel like pure life that goes against death.

Aysha Demina. I had a similar experience. In my teens I sometimes could not eat or sleep. I felt nothing. Knowledge of patterns and working with them influenced me like energy. It is a process against nothingness. A creative act literally produces materiality out of air. At the start you have space and loose bundles of thread. You mix them and a new structure of reality appears. It is close to alchemy.

Boris Klyshnikov. Another aspect is the stitch as surgery. A seam is the body’s trace. Weaving has the atmosphere of healing through a process that can be unpleasant yet revealing.

Aysha Demina. I used to have a weak sense of my own body. Weaving returned my body to me. It materialized it. You can feel this in traditional clothing too. A garment is sewn for a specific person by you or by someone close. A problem of contemporary capitalist reality is that we do not feel how things are made. They appear as if from nowhere. Identical and perfect. Without flaws.

Boris Klyshnikov. What gives the sense that a thing is made.

Aysha Demina. You can see and feel it as time lived by the maker and condensed in the object. You sense otherness. A unique vibration of handwriting. I often run open studios. People weave very differently and depending on their state. We talk and live through things together and that care gets woven into the material. Many cultures believe a crafted object has a spirit that becomes sad if the thing is not used. A spoon, a plate, a sweater, a key fob — they want to serve and become part of your life.

Audience. Thank you so much. I love science and I love how the brain perceives art. Your story of three suns gave me images of nature and smells. It is amazing how art restructures perception. You spoke about a telepathic effect and about how the practice helps with mental states. Do people who try weaving return to it. What happens with children.

Aysha Demina. I am very interested in color. Different colors affect me differently. It is hard for me to look at black for long. With children it is important to be part of a shared process. Otherwise they close up. I do not force anyone. If a child wants to try I offer it. Someone dives in and weaves for a long time. Someone tries a little and runs away. Adults are the same. Manual practices fit some and annoy others. That is fine.

Boris Klyshnikov. It seems we are not speaking about art as such but about aesthetic experience. Color is not an artwork. Funny enough in art history color was long considered secondary. It only comes to the fore at the end of the nineteenth century with Van Gogh and Seurat. In weaving and in music we encounter this experience directly.

Color is curious. With color objectification and domination begin. I say red and each of you has red in mind. But which red. We never see pure red. We always see it with something else. Even in a fully red room the light matters and what colors you saw before matter. Still the word red standardizes endless variety.

By the way people often asked today how long a piece took. I see two motives. One is to find an analogy they already know. The other is a capitalist optic that counts time.

Aysha Demina. When I work I do not feel time. For me it is spatial perception and almost timeless.

Boris Klyshnikov. Music is the same. After twelve hours you realize you have become time. Not clock time but Bergsonian duration. People feel it because they rarely meet it in daily life. Maybe in cooking. There is magic there too. No soup is ever identical.

Aysha Demina. I explain the value of made things through food. When someone close cooks for you it is time and care put into a thing.

Boris Klyshnikov. That brings class consciousness. You start to see labor. It changes your relation to production and maybe makes you a revolutionary subject.

Aysha Demina. At first I tried to weave like a machine, perfectly even. Then I realized there is no need to imitate the loom. In later works I moved away from evenness and left the trace of the hand. Forms became freer.

Audience. We have been talking a lot about the body and the psyche. Are we still talking about art.

Boris Klyshnikov. More about the second option and that matches what is happening now. There is an exit from contemporary art toward a critique through life. In feminist literature writing is often linked to weaving. For me the link is stronger with music. Text is harder for me. The question remains how to hold this experience in language.

Aysha Demina. I think people live in a vast space of misunderstanding. Even when we try to be direct others imagine us differently. This led me to a principle of honesty and simple language to reduce distance.

Boris Klyshnikov. We used to talk a lot about medium. I increasingly think textile is not a medium. In the nineteen nineties transmediality was key. You combined discourses of painting, photography, video. What we are discussing now is not discourses. It is an integral experience — an attempt to approach a core from many sides. In that state you discover that color is sound because both are waves. The spirits that inhabit us are impulses. They do not need explanations. They should be registered like a seismograph.

A thread in weaving itself travels a wave. It is a strong metaphor. My mind is full of dots now. After a certain crisis I stopped evaluating art as objects and began to live by collecting strength through dots and their combinations. Kandinsky wrote that people love painting not for recognition but because the body enjoys how yellow meets red. Mood lifts. Strength flows in. Our task is to pass this to others and not to lose focus ourselves. We need to concentrate on what matters most. There is not much time. The world is cracking. We look for new means and we split in this search.