Project name: What I wanted to say. What I said.
Medium: site-specific text-based installation
Year: 2022
Tags: #social_distance #broken_communication #obsession #phobia #depression
Credits: Ksenia Bashmakova, Jenya Jahina



This project is about personal correspondence as a way of showing feelings at a distance. Poetry of loneliness, uncertainty, fear, isolation and boredom manifest themselves through the rearranged quotes from letters to a friend.

The project was a part of exhibition "DSCH" in Gewandhaus, Leipzig in February 2022.

For almost 40 years Dmitry Shostakovich corresponded with his close friend Isaac Glickman. These letters were quite personal, in which Shostakovich complained to his friend about everyday and personal problems, about his work, about his doubts and worries connected with it. After Shostakovich’s death Glickman published these letters in his book “Letters to a Friend”. I took this letters and used them as a medium to talk about depression, anxiety, loneliness and fear. In the installation there are 4 different meta-letters in a form of 4 short Poems.

If you want to read all the letters, write me an email and I will send you pdf file: kseny.bashmak@gmail.com.

»DSCH«‎ Exhibition in Gewandhaus, Leipzig 2022

Students of the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig from the class expanded cinema by Clemens von Wedemeyer and Mareike Bernien developed cross-media and site-specific installations in dialogue with the art and artworks of the house.

My project "What I wanted to say. What I said" was a part of this exhibition.
Letters were exhibited in two languages: in russian and in german