24 Minutes on April 12
Video, 24:00 min, color, sound.
Photo series: 24 stills.
Performance, 2021
On April 12, 2021, the 60th Cosmonautics Day, a video camera was activated every hour from 00:00 to 23:00 on the fifth floor of an apartment building in Chelyabinsk. Each time, it captured exactly one minute of the courtyard’s life. The result is a 24-minute video slice — a daily rhythm divided into 24 fragments.
The project merges the gesture of regular recording, observation of the everyday, and work with cultural myth. It is accompanied by a poetic text that turns the footage into a reflection on time, memory, and return.
This rhythmic montage becomes a way of documenting not an event, but absence: Gagarin “took off but never returned,” and the courtyard transforms into a lunar landscape of time. The accompanying poetic commentary evokes images of displaced memory, disintegration of measure, sand as a code, and multiple “Yurys” frozen in orbital vigil.
The work brings together observation, writing, poetry, and video in a meditative structure where each minute becomes a module and the courtyard — a screen for projecting inner space.
24 Minutes on April 12
A poetic text, an integral part of the project.
Evening, April 11, 2021. I didn’t go to sleep.
I was waiting: at midnight, the anniversary began — 60 years since the first human spaceflight.
Exactly at 00:00, I turned on the camera on the balcony. Fifth floor. Courtyard view. Chelyabinsk.
Every hour, I pressed “record” for exactly one minute.
It resulted in 24 shots. 24 minutes. One day.
…
Time froze in a 60-year-long still frame.
Yuri took off — but never returned.
We are still waiting for him.
He is not a hero — he is a trace. An absence. A loop.
While children dig in the sand, the lunar landscape turns into a concrete courtyard.
Grass grows through the cracks,
and the shadow of the swing lands precisely where someone’s back used to be.
…
60 years turn into 60 months.
Then into days.
Then — into minutes.
24 drops fall into the sand.
60 million grains, 24 pools of light,
and 24 Yuri Gagarins stand watch in orbit.
Each has 24 fingers, 24 balconies,
and 24 portholes — from which nothing can be seen.
…
I look into the yard,
and I see space —
a space from which the sound has been cut.
Time is a function of the brain.
But here, the brain fails.
It hums like a transformer.
It whispers through glass.
It offers jars filled with fingers,
and instead of a reply —
a balcony.
…
We approach the plain from above.
Just as
inner radiance approaches the eye,
and the eye —
eternity.
Display options
— Video (24:00), presented on screen or as projection
— Series of 24 photographs (one frame per hour)
— Text presented on the wall or as a booklet / audio voiceover
Photo grid
Exhibition view from the group show Abra Shvabra Kadabra, curated by Yana Malinovskaya, Gallery 22, Moscow, 2021.