The exhibition takes place in a small independent gallery “Kerka” (translated from the language of the Komi Republic, “Kerka” means “House”), which in its structure resembles catacombs rather than a house. To enter, the visitor must pass through a network of courtyards and, bending under the roof, find themselves inside a space with low ceilings located below ground level on the basement floor.

Entering a symmetrically organized space with a violet glow from grow lights and bright green light coming through the windows, one finds oneself in a place for a séance, where contact between the material and the immaterial, the living and the dead takes place. Where one can try to establish a connection with a ghost through karaoke.

In the center of the space there is a stand with a microphone and a screen on which karaoke is running. The visitor can take the place of the missing element and try on the role of a servant of the mass or a medium calling spirits to life. This empty place is itself ghostological. In its usual conception, hauntology considers the future that did not arrive: utopian models of the world that, for some reason, did not pass the test of reality and remained in another world coexisting with ours as ghosts. In this work, this concept is played out from the side of the possibility of this experience, the possibility of occupying a nonexistent place, giving voice to ghosts, letting them grow, connecting to them on their own territory.

The subtitles for the karaoke — a text of the popular song Bruno Mars – “The Other Side,” translated through Google Translate, with a strongly slowed instrumental track — create a situation in which it is impossible to sing the slowly moving words on the screen. Only in a situation of impossibility do the conditions for performing the song open through faith. This is very similar to the situation of perceiving art, a situation in which it is necessary to step out of one’s habitual coordinates toward another (world), a place where all coordinates shift their degree. The viewer is invited to sing, invited to believe in art, but always at the cost of stepping out of one’s body, at the cost of pure faith — irrational and promising nothing.

In the space, mutually exclusive images are hallucinatorily combined: karaoke-mass, grow lights for plant growth, organic remains of cotton, ruined wool inhabited by mucous bald patches, the insides of these ruins — digital images: stock photographs of a family, extinct white giraffes, amateur videos from a dolphinarium, fill and swarm like maggots inside the body of these tomb-like objects.