Syntax Gallery is pleased to announce new exhibition by Jenia Granilshchikov.

The artist presents a series of new works examining identity, human vulnerability, and the experiences of solitude, love, and loss through performative gestures, paintings, and video, unfolding as symbolic journeys.

Curator — Nassibakhon Tairova

This project is a collaboration between Iragui Gallery and Syntax Gallery
43 Rue de la Commune de Paris
93230 Romainville, France

There is a particular form of solitude that is neither a withdrawal nor a voluntary isolation.  A solitude that is not chosen, but produced by history, by language, by the very conditions of the modernity that is our contemporary. SOLO is situated within this unstable zone not as a celebration of the individual, but as the methodical exposition of contemporary subject compelled to be someone, here and now, without lasting guarantee. 

Jenia Granilshchikov’s work has been unfolding for several years in a field where body, language, and history meet without ever perfectly coinciding. Video performances, films, paintings, texts, repeated gestures; everything in his work stems from a rigorous, almost ascetic, economy of means that rejects both illustration and declaration. It is not a matter of representing history but rather of experiencing its concrete, often silent, effects on ordinary forms of life. Here, this logic reaches a point of condensation. The exhibition is constructed like a story without a stable narrator, where each work acts as an autonomous chapter, linked to the others with recurring motifs : the fall, repetition, the impossibility of return, the fragility of language, the persistence of the gesture despite its apparent ineffectiveness… and then the reinvention of oneself in a new context. 

From the outset, The Fall establishes a framework. The artist, seated on a dry branch, methodically cuts the very support that keeps him balanced. The scene is simple, almost banal. Yet, it condenses a highly precise conceptual operation : a linguistic metaphor translated from the Russian expression "Don’t saw off the branch you’re sitting on" is read literally, like an instruction to be carried out. Language here ceases to be a commentary on the world; it becomes an operative force. The fall is neither accidental nor dramatic: it is logical, programmed, inscribed in advance in the very structure of the statement, like a cursed, inevitable. 

This gesture reveals what modernity often tends to conceal: the fact that language is never neutral. It organizes behaviors, produces norms, and distributes possible positions. By making this operation visible and almost pedagogical, Granilshchikov does not denounce; she knows. She allows the body to fully assume the consequence of a sentence. 

This transition from discourse to action reveals what Michel Foucault has consistently emphasized: the subject is not the fee origin of his gestures, but the product of discursive regimes, norms, and classifications that organize what is thinkable and feasible. 

Faced with this inevitable fall, The Thread proposes an alternative temporal framework. In a snowy, almost abstract landscape, like Ariadne, the artist unwinds a res thread, step by step, in a circular and inconclusive movement. The thread, borrowed from foundational narratives of return, becomes a fragile timeline, a remnant of story telling to cling to. But nothing indicates that it leads anywhere. The gesture repeats prolongs, persists. It does not promise return; it merely maintains the possibility of continuing. 

This work resonates with the theoretical reflexion of Stuart Hall, for whom identity is not a matter of being, but of becoming. It is never complete or finished; it is constituted through discontinuities, losses, and shifts. In the Thread, identity appears as a temporary point of fixation in a flow of differences — a moment of suspension rather than a culmination.

Between these two poles of fatalistic instruction and hope without guarantee, the exhibition unfolds as a series of attempts. The paintings and textual prints function as fragments of discourse torn from their context: Have you ever seen as much snow as I have? ; I’m a lonely cloud, I know this is late, but I wanted to say hello, And there’s no coming back to the place you came from.
These phrases do not seek to convince or explain. They exist as remnants, fragmented surviving statements bearing an experience that can no longer be expressed except in fragments, yet with resonates surprisingly with each viewer. 

This fragmentation of a universal discourse refers to what Homi Bhaba described as the Third Space: an intermediate space, produced by translation, displacement, and the in-betweeen. In Granilshchikov’s work, identity is neither rooted nor synthetic; it is formed in the gap, in the shift, in the partial loss of meaning. Language always appears slightly behind experience, as if trying to catch up without ever fully succeeding. 

The text ”I Went Through… ”, presented as a list of political, emotional, institutional, and so on endured crises, acts as an anti-autobiography. Identity does not appear as a stable core, but as a temporary residue of what remains after having passed through. There is no heroic narrative here, only a patient accumulation of trials, recounted with an almost bureaucratic neutrality. A subtle form of humor also creeps in, that of a list too long to be credible, yet you precise to be fictional. 

This logic reaches a radical form in The Skin, one of the artist’s last works created over a long period. This painting attempts to reproduce, day after day, the imperceptible nuances of the artist’s skin. The gesture, here to, is meticulous, repetitive, and devoted to approximation. The skin, supposedly the surface of identity, becomes here an abstract fiels, impossible to define. The closer the artist gets, the more the object eludes him. Identity then appears not as recognition, but as an endless task, like the labor of Sisyphus. 

What runs through SOLO is the idea that contemporary identity is neither given nor freely chosen . It is produced in a space of tension between obligation and becoming, betweendisceourse and body. The modern subject is compelled to maintain a coherent narrative of themselves, and it is precisely this demand that generates anxiety, fatigue, and sometimes collapse. 

Yet Jenia Granilshchikov offers no solution. He seeks neither repair nor reconciliation. His works do not deliver a message; they organize situations. The body acts within them, repeats, fails, persistes. And in this persistence, something is at stake: a form of micro-resistance, fragile, unheroic, but profoundly human. 

Being SOLO, here, does not mean being alone in the world. It means being exposed, without a safety net, to the necessity of continuing to act even when meaning wavers, even when the end is already written in the sentence. 

Nassibakhon Tairova