Sénsa rìve / Off shore

As you enter the exhibition space, the first thing that hits you is a painfully familiar melody: 'My Heart Will Go On' from the endlessly recycled Titanic soundtrack. You then sit down on an inflatable banana boat “Приплыли” (They've Arrived). It appears to have been tossed here or left behind after a storm. In front of you, the title video work, “Sénsa rìve” (2025), is projected onto a fabric curtain. The curtain trembles in the breeze. The projector itself is strangely concealed in a blue IKEA bag, as if it were an embarrassing item or had been forgotten. Nearby stands a bottle of water, one of the key attributes of underground raves.

From this point onwards, the exhibition begins to guide your body through simple orders and commands issued without voice. The display is constructed as a chain of micro-gestures and visual tricks. Works are hidden in boxes, embedded in wall crevices or placed on the ceiling. Others require awkward bodily effort from the viewer, such as tilting your head back, bending down or stopping short. This constant disruption to the usual viewing experience becomes part of the work's meaning. Words and phrases in different languages: “помяло” (crumpled), "отдай!" (give it back), “Дезертир” (deserter), "ухилянт" (draft dodger), "Море по колоено" (knee-deep in the sea) appear as traces of linguistic pressure. Nikolay Karabinovych’s exhibition Sénsa rive / Off shore is a series of spatial, temporal, linguistic and bodily displacements. It is a project about the loss of footing, where the 'absence of shores' ceases to be a metaphor for freedom and instead becomes a zone of instability, forced movement with no destination and stagnation. Karabinovych explores the concept of 'transition' and the state of suspension between authoritarian control and power, fluid identities, and ongoing catastrophes.

In Sénsa rìve / Off shore, the artist continues his exploration of linguistic systems by proposing tactics of resistance and introducing the notion of 'Билибирда' (nonsense or childish gibberish). The text in his works resembles shamanic incantations. Rather than explaining what is happening, it sustains anxiety and shows the splitting of meaning. Repetition, doubling, symmetry and empty signs (such as a 'red flag' that is completely white) create a space in which traces have lost their credibility. 'Дна нет' (There is no bottom), as stated in one of the works.

Another layer of In Sénsa rìve / Off shore, not immediately legible, revolves around the motif of the displaced, abandoned human figure — a body that has fallen outside of a stable social scene. This figure appears in the new work 'Выходец' (Native...). Karabinovych addresses the image of the forgotten comedian Yefim Shifrin, captured at the moment of his late-life transformation into a bodybuilder. The artist sees his figure as a symbol of the post-Soviet politics of visibility and adaptation. The divided body, bound with tape and enclosed in an aluminium frame, represents the result of pressure to rewrite the object according to dominant norms. In another piece from the same series, a Boney M. vinyl record — 'Rivers of Babylon' — is likewise tightly wound with tape, becoming a fixed symbol of migratory speculation. In the continuation of the series, "Хухры-Мухры" (Flimflam), the hypermasculine babysitter-bodybuilder figures from a cult 1990s film “Twin Sitters” become ritual doubles and guardians of emptiness.

This logic is most evident in the central piece of the exhibition. The image of the heroine gliding across murky water in a yellow boat is reminiscent of an earlier found footage video by Karabinovych from the Vukojebina project (2021), in which an unknown woman is seen laughing while stuck in a fence on the border between Ukraine and the EU. In that video, the body is literally trapped in a gap: stopped, held captive and on display. Here, however, the heroine continues to move, but this movement does not lead to a shore or imply an exit. Again, the curtain sways, and the pathos of Céline Dion’s song clashes sharply with the image on screen. The inflatable boat beneath you remains as it was from the beginning: a form that pretends to provide support, but which could pull you down into a bottomless depth at any moment — just around the bend — where everything would repeat again and again and again.

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