Lena Skripkina.
Mercury (18+)
2025
Russian
96
Artists' Books
This artist’s book is a journey through the “invisible cities” of memory, in which sound and image become means of holding onto what is vanishing.
Mercury resembles an enigmatic letter from another reality: here, myths intertwine with fantasies and everyday observations. Wandering across the floating islands of memory—like drifting ice floes—the artist Lena Skripkina reflects on the fragility of time and the inevitable ebb of life into oblivion. Illusory images merge with real geography: the book includes personal photographs taken on the Solovetsky Islands, in Norilsk, the Murmansk region, and Dagestan.
All photos: Ruslan Shavaleev
Lena Skripkina (b. 1988) is an artist, documentary filmmaker, theologian, and intellectual volunteer with the Vera Hospice Charity Foundation and the G. N. Speransky Children’s Hospital. She is a recipient of the Innovation Prize (2017), the founder of the “Botanical Time” laboratory, and a grantee of the first three open calls of
The snow falling outside the window thickened into a dense mass, allowing nothing to be seen but its own whirling spirals, fragmentarily lit by various sources of light, which gave it a kind of geometric mobility. All this fused into a vague, boundless image of wondrous otherworldly transformation; everything disappeared, absorbed by the movement of the snow, and it was unclear whether the world at that very moment was near or infinitely distant, caught in an unexpected act of observation.
— Lena Skripkina, “The Double Time of the Polar Night”
An essential element of Mercury is its musical accompaniment, recorded at the The Vaults Centre for Artistic Production. Readers of the book will find it to contain QR codes allowing them to listen to Skripkina’s original compositions, and a sound chip that plays Maurice Ravel’s Pavane for a Dead Princess. Texts, photographs, and music blend into an attempt to bring memories back to life and hold them in motion. The color blue, one of the shades of water, serves as the visual leitmotif of Mercury, which continues the exploration of time’s flow and suspension begun by Skripkina in earlier projects.
Editor
Olga Stebleva
Design and layout
Elena Pogodina