It is Paris Fashion Week. Le Marais is the epitome of an area submerged by attendees, the pursuit of acceptance and aesthetics pulsates through every corner. On one of its streets, at MASSIMODECARLO Pièce Unique, artist Vladislav Markov (b. 1993, Magadan) has opened TERRITORIES, an installation covered in earth. Three teenagers are encapsulated within walls, one of them a glass shopfront, busy getting dirt under their nails. They are playing nozhichki, the morbidious children’s game popularized during the Soviet and post-Soviet era, seen somewhere between contemplation and action, depending on the timing of the passerby.

Built on territorial acquisition, Markov has opened the door to violent doctrine for this trio, equipped only with themselves and pocket knives. What starts innocently, drawing a circle in the dirt to divide equal home territory, is amplified by flicking a knife upright into the opponent’s land, earning a newly carved-out slice of terra firma. It’s a spectral powerplay where borders are redrawn according to the sovereign thrower, eliminating the player left without land.

Everyone is familiar with the sensation of being close, but not close enough. Markov tricks us into closeness, proximity to situations that captivate, yet we remain powerless. His first take on this confined spectrality came in 2025, through OBJECTS IN MIRROR MAY BE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR in New York, employing an almost Foucaultian character of the gaze as surveillance. Viewers observed a staged strip club behind a one-way mirror wall. Performers were handpicked by Markov, amputees whom he contracted online and for whom he crafted customized prosthetics. One year later, in Zürich, Location. Location. Location., a kitchen became the site for looping discussions on someone recently passed. He returns to this bystander effect, using detentive tactics founded on a sense of involvement later pulled back by precarious restraint. Think observation without involvement, though non-involvement might still brew the same level of controversy.

A knife hits rivaling territory and another border is redrawn. What differentiates Markov from Walter De Maria’s New York Earth Room (1977), where 127,000 kilograms of soil was, and still is, housed in a SoHo loft, is the continued alteration of the substance itself. There’s temporality: new shape takes form as lands are occupied, as feet and blades pierce through the sand. We’re witnesses to an unending process, our eyes peeled on a real game with real stakes. Some turn off to the next runway show in the land of commercialism; others revel in cruelty and violence as they attempt to set the rules.

Markov’s uncanniness mirrors the structural fractures of existentialism: humans are spawned into a playground, left to construct their own reality or rely on a coherently lacking security. It adds to the distress that the players are minors, children attempting to confront these structures. It reminds me of Heidegger’s idea of Geworfenheit, this “thrownness” that comes with remarkable fragility, particularly for children dependent on adults to cement a strong enough illusion of order and safety. In this power play, we see children use violence as a coping mechanism to tackle the vicious parameters they never signed up for.

Five paintings accompany the showcase, their titles double as messages. One of them, Hi be carefull was hacked. If I ask you something (money or help) in one of our conversations ignore it. (2026). They’re smudged mashups of the participating players: some bodies stretched, others melted into something barely human. Each generates the same feeling, this compromise between unsettling and compelling, as we are presented with distorted bodies amidst this originally harmless game of territorial positioning.

TERRITORIES is Vladislav Markov’s way to single out a visceral childhood pastime of his own and bring it straight into the anxiety of human existence and development. It is a high-stakes game of the infinite kind: resources are endless and one can ceaselessly conquer, but always at the cost of another’s loss. This installation removes the beautification of life, leaving us with dire human needs, dire human survival. While others try to cover existential dread in flaunting outfits and performing as-should in the great play of life, these confined individuals become a physical manifestation of the same, core dread.