CURA.

For the exhibition OBJECTS IN MIRROR MAY BE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR, at Management gallery in New York, Vladislav Markov transports us into a suspended and indistinguishable space, placed between reality and fiction. It is the hallucinatory dimension, not far from us, yet already unfolding in the present, approaching us unnoticed, slipping under our skin and revealing itself: no longer a mere narrative, but a substitution of reality.

The gallery space is transformed into a black box, in which any reference point is lost. Around us there is only darkness, and in front of us opens a fictitious dimension, an image-space to observe, present but intangible, generated by a partition wall made of one-way mirror, like the shopping mall surveillance rooms or interrogation chambers. The gallery thus transforms into a stage-like device where it is our presence – or our gaze – that makes it real.

On one side, the viewer, a voyeur in the dark who observes from the glass; on the other, the observed, two amputees trapped in their reflection within a filthy strip club, with a dirty mirror on the back wall that reveals another internal one, creating depth and light effects from cold, oval lamps.

Black-and-white checkered catwalks rest on a tiger-striped upholstery alternating with red carpet. Rising above them are pole-dancing poles piercing the ceiling. Empty beer bottles, cigarette butts, and forgotten banknotes on the floor or on the platforms evoke a sense of emptiness – the comedown that follows a peak of emotion.

On stage, the two mutilated men are bored. They pace back and forth across the room, they look at their phones, scrolling, as if in a waiting room, suspended in time and space. Focused on their prostheses – created by the artist for the occasion – they are captured in their being-image, integrating physical filters and bugs that represent the invisible toxicity around us. They look like fictional protagonists in a TV monitor, but they are distortions of reality, yet more real than reality itself: “…it’s an extroversion without depth, a kind of advertising naïveté where each person becomes the impresario of their own appearance.”^[1]

It is precisely this advertising naïveté that continuously echoes in our ears in the background, feeding the hallucinatory confusion. Created by ssaliva, with sound contributions by artists Vipra Sativa, emma dj, and Jon Rafman, the soundtrack functions as a dramatic musical accompaniment, reminiscent of the looping music of a waiting room or a video-games idle screen, alternated with songs and ads voiced by actors, recalling the stations of famous video games such as GTA.

The radio naïveté is exaggerated to the point of parody. From jokes to selling courses on resisting AI to keep one’s job, culminating in a conversation between DJ Brad and Josh (which we hear in the video), who discuss prostheses and amputees while narrating astonishing, humorous, and surreal actions that nevertheless become real, making us feel inadequate in comparison, turning the prosthesis into a fetish.

Satire turns everything upside down. In the end, it’s the observer who feels guilty and intrusive in this distorted, mirrored world that stands before us, more undeniable than ever. The statement “OBJECTS IN MIRROR MAY BE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR”, which frequently interrupts the soundtrack, captures the collision between reality and simulation. It resembles like the warning found on car side mirrors, but it’s not since the correct phrase would be “objects in mirror are closer than they appear”. It’s “Mandela effect”: a common phenomenon nowadays that describes a shared false memory, a slippage between perception and reality.

Markov conveys this as a lucid metaphor of the human condition: we trade our rights and truths for safety and self-expression. We are no longer force, as under fascism, we merely pretend. No one can see anymore that “the emperor has no clothes”. We swallow the truth because there is no truth left, just a simulation, a filtered reality that has become real. Awkwardness is not in the emperor or the other – it is buried inside us. We look around, convincing ourselves that nothing can touch us, until we realize that we are the impostor. Both perpetrators and victims, we feel the discomfort  deep inside us. We are voyeurs, feeling guilty in front of our own image, which has taken power over us.