09/12/2023
Semiotics of subjective transcendent experience
Olya Sharlat / 2018-2023
/ Series of Olya Sharlat’s works explores and wants to share the experience of the navigation of the person being lost in its existential ‘forest’. Some objects, forms and assemblages appear to become symbols and navigation signs for the life of a lost person – most of us experienced this way of interpretation in our childhood, and a lot of us re-experienced it, being lost in 2022-2023. And, while a symbol or a sign is a means of communication, and, in this ‘existential navigation’, when we find signs on the street, a local market, in friend’s apartment of in the sky, there’s no human being who intentionally placed the sign there – who’s the second side of this communication?
This question connects Olya Sharlat’s series to the one of the topics of Bibikhin philosophy behind the ‘Fallyng and staying’ installation. Does our brain randomly project its own phantoms of meaning to the forms of the reality, or does reality somehow correspond with our thinking structure and is readable because of this common nature (or creature) which formed our mind and universe in a corresponded way?
Sharing her own symbols of existential navigation, artist invites us both to interpret her signs and to remind our own episodes of existential navigation. /
George Zaborski, apophenic co-curator of the Forest University
