Architextile
The title of the exhibition, Architextile or All Sewn Up, refers to the controversial nature of our perception of the objects that surround us, space as well as time and the place of humans in the world.
Maria Arendt sometimes comes across such a degree of defamiliarization that she transforms what is mundane beyond all recognition and leads us to elude normal perception. In Maria’s hands, architecture loses its usual qualities and becomes light and airy. Turning to her family history, the artist constructs a variety of scenarios that bring the past back into the present in various changing plots.
What lies behind the worldview of an artist who practices embroidery? What is it, that lurks behind the fabric? Why is it she chose this as her medium?
Maria Arendt’s lineage produced a handful of prominent personalities, whose history she uses in her works. Among them were Nikolay Andreevich Arendt, one of the founders of Russian aviation and aeronautics, as well as Nikolay Fedorovitch Arendt, the Tsar’s doctor who treated the poet Alexander Pushkin after he was mortally wounded in a duel. To these must be added the sculptor and graphic artist Ariadna Arendt and the sculptor Meer Eisenstadt. The history of the Arendt family is firmly intertwined with the history of Russian art and culture. Kinship with these ancestors inspires today’s generation.
Maria’s works are like the lightest of buildings. What she creates are tents or pavilions where you can find shelter while travelling through life. They offer a place where one can recover one’s breath, listen to oneself, and set new goals. Her constructions are clothes that can become a universal talisman, a barrier against the drastic temperature changes in the climate of our times.
Maria Arendt’s art captures the «fabric of life» metaphor that is used to describe the union and interweaving of vital rhythms. This not only applies to physiology, but also to the fluctuations in the ecosystems that surrounds us and how we interact with them. In this context, the image of a fabric is a very neat one that defines the interplay of accents and pauses and their constant re-iteration. We may picture how the appearance within the fabric of knots, pauses, stitches, and rhythmic variations change our perception of its texture and may allude to an event and thus to meanings. According to Gilles Dellese, «sense is ‘an event’, on condition that the event is not confused with its spatio-temporal realization. We will therefore not ask what is the sense of the event: the event itself is the sense.»
It’s difficult to locate the artist, as she is in constant search of the events existing in-between physical and metaphorical realities. Thus, by sewing in a fabric at a level that becomes a ritual action, Arendt intertwines the fragments of her own micro-history, the lives of her family, what is real and what are imaginary events and documenting them in a material field. It is with stitches that the author structures her metaphorical world and creates an architecture that would become hypermobile and unstable in the physical world. This is so powerful and so precise that it forces us to step out of our habitual existence and recollect the OTHER.
Alexey Tregubov, Olga Turchina
