Sasha Budayv, Untitled (6)

As is something that was not meant to be seen.

In 2018 with my partner and child I relocated to the US after a year of hovering in wait for our future to be determined by mysteriously opaque machinery of the officialdom. Though barely realizing that at the time, we were going through the swift and traumatizing sequence of transitions which essentially an immigration is. Torn off of virtually all relations established by then, not fully comprehending the nature of transformations taking place, I committed to a project that now I see as the embodiment of intellectual and emotional coping processes many migrants undertake.

The Plan for Conquering Nature is a series of images ranging from small to medium sized paintings, to digital collages, to interventions. Through these unpacks the story about a quasi nietzschean protagonist, their exile and wanders, and an attempt to overthrow the dominance of symbolic Nature. Nature that embodies hostile and unpredictable elemental ‘scape where, by the virtue of all-governing principle that is concealed and hermetic to the point no one can tell what it is, the lost “hero” deprived of their sense of personal agency wanders in search of the “reset lever”. Disillusionment and terror of the unknown force one to either compromise their beliefs, or ultimately alienate themselves adopting vindictive violence against the figure associated with the source of the oppression.

While the story remains ambiguous, the visual language and certain attributes unequivocally root the project in a certain discourse. There are intentional borrowings from early post-October-revolution figuration and montage (e.g. OST and LEF) and its later reception (Moscow conceptualism, "underground"). Not least, both story and "scenography" are greatly influenced by socialist sci-fi literature, most importantly Strugatsky brothers and Stanislaw Lem. In particular, project draws from the Lem's Summa Technologiae.

Sasha Budayv (Aleksandr Budayev) is an artist and educator born in 1988 in Minsk, Belarus.

From 2004 through 2008 he studied painting at Minsk State Art College. From 2008 through 2014 – at Saint-Petersburg Academy of Art. Shortly after Sasha is involved in the experimental educational project initiated by the Chto Delat art group.

From 2014 to 2018 Sasha has been exhibiting his works in Belarus, Russia, Germany, France, Poland, Estonia and the UK. His projects at that time focused on problems of the cultural/historical memory, procedures of meaning production, and collective actions and self-organization as drivers of the political imagination.

In September 2018 Budayv moved to the US. In 2023 he earned an MFA from Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University. Participating in group shows in NYC and Philadelphia.

The central themes of Budayv’s latest work are the reception of avant-garde’s legacy in experimental pedagogy, “weak power” of non-representational and peripheral modes of knowledge production, the observation as a tool for reimagining the epistemological and imaginative horizon beyond the convention of the language.

Lives and works in Philadelphia, PA