A COLLECTION OF CHESS KOANS

Solo Exhibition | LUCH Gallery
25 May – 11 August, 2024

In his work Alexander Sokolov constantly refers to the theme of game. The exhibition at LUCH Gallery is dedicated to the phenomenon of Anarchy Chess and presents a new series of paintings and objects created during the author's long journey through Asia countries.

Anarchy Chess is one of many variations of chess rules that appeared almost as a joke. One day a reedit user with the nickname Scurlocc suggested playing the game according to the following rules: each move is selected according to the most popular comment, one move per day. It is not necessary to follow the rules of classical chess, so the participants try to offer the most absurd moves. His proposal was warmly welcomed by the community, and the new rules were given the name Anarchy Chess.

The artist believes that this phenomenon includes all previous and future changes to the rules of chess game and requires a new logic of thinking, close to the Buddhist koan*. The goal of the game is to go beyond the previously preseted options and move from a rational to a more intuitive point of view.

Following this idea, the artist creates the first collection of Anarchy Chess tasks, where the tasks are presented not in the form of a book, but in the form of canvases and objects. A special approach is required to solve them.

The exhibition presents sculptural figures of the author's chess Knight, which is the calling card of Alexander Sokolov as a street artist, a kinetic object prismatron playing hide-and-seek with the viewer, as well as eight paintings with augmented reality.

To see the virtual supplement for the paintings, you need QR to use the application with vpn enabled.

Some animated paintings are also featured on the LUCH Gallery's YouTube channel.

*Koan is a riddle or a short parable containing a problem that cannot be rationaly solved. In Zen Buddhism it is one of the main training methods that helps to achieve enlightenment. The main goal of the koan is the transformation of the practitioner's consciousness in order to overcome the framework of discursive logical thinking, originated from a dual perception of the world, and to gain an intuitive vision of reality that does not separate one's own "myself" from the surrounding "not-myself".

SERIES "GUANGZHOU"

The series describe the artist's perseption of the city on his journey: there are children's drawings on the walls and items in museums, information posters in the subway, advertising, people, objects, architecture and... inprints of sewerage system. In the color scheme he uses a palette that has a symbolic meaning and direct association with traditional Chinese culture.

SAMSARA

The video installation was made in collaboration with Alexander Makarov. It is based on the idea of the transience of gaming life, reflections on death and new life. The death of a PC (playing character) at 8 and 16-bit playstations is when the PC is destroyed and turned off from the gameplay (usually irreversibly). Often the death of a character is seen as a negative phenomenon — it throws the player out of the normal course of the gameplay, sending him to regenerate and forcing him to return to the beginning of the game. And sometimes the player prefers to switch to a new game with a different character and setting. Thus, a person resembles a Hindu god who "descends" into the game world and incarnates in the guise of a PC for the sake of "saving the world", and the character becomes his avatar (Sansrit अवतार, IAST: avatāra, «descent»). And the path of rebirth in the form of different heroes is nothing but samsara (Sansrit saṃsāra "wander") — the cycle of birth and death in the worlds.

Technical design: 12-channel video installation. The duration of one video cycle is 9 seconds. On twelve computer screens arranged in a circle, the characters of computer games move clockwise, "moving" from screen to screen and appearing each time in a new image. The installation literally fixing this cycle, this journey from one game to another, and despite the fact that the characters change quite quickly, along the trajectory, we can guess that it is a ongoing path of the same player in different images.