The central video of that exhibition depicts collecting New Year’s spruces from the trash in my town. In January 2013, I had my first solo show called ‘ Requiem for a New Year’ in Minsk, Belarus. How did your current show at Management in New York come about, and did you do anything different in the work for it? In general so-called inanimate nature or Geosphere, it’s something to rethink. I like the ancient idea of building relationships with an object, which is opposed to contemporaneity’s disposable logic. I think of installation as one interconnected organism where sculptures are its agents.

In a way, it’s like the since-fiction concept of an oracular engine on board a spaceship that simulates native places to relax astronauts. How do you think about making sculptural work versus making installation work, if you consider them separate?Īs far as I remember, I intended to create dimensions or spaces filled with the atmosphere that would trigger all possible receptors. Until all the needles fall (detail), 2023.

Today, my method applies the lenses of scientific research and spiritual search to the information society and its atavisms. Later, the first personal computer and the internet made everything even more delirious, granting access to a wide range of cognitive distortions that often caused a hypnotic effect. My long-standing fascination with forests and rivers appeared as the need to escape a stagnating dimension of the socio-sphere. I think the family tradition of picking mushrooms contributed to my practice essentially it was not just the form of a reunion within nature but a way to survive the intense economic crisis that hit the system at that moment. It was a highly intriguing time television broadcast psychics’ sessions hypnotizing water while most union assembly halls were occupied by various religious sects, expanding like mycelium. Specific memories, such as the first seen funeral procession moving slowly through the city, an open catafalque decorated with two spruces installed from both sides of the deceased, stuck to my young brain. In the 90s, after prolonged atheistic suppression, the spiritual boom hit the post-Soviet region, revealing a bizarre psychological and semantic glitch that left a remarkable trace on me. Tell us a bit about yourself and what you do. He also participated in the 14th Baltic Triennial, CAC (Vilnius, LT), and the 4th Art Encounters Biennial (Timișoara, RO). (Ghent,BE), Calvert 22 Foundation (London, UK), Blaffer Art Museum (Houston, US), Museum de Domijnen (Sittard, NL), Mystetskyi Arsenal (Kyiv, UA), Arsenal Gallery (Białystok, PL) and others. Since 2012, Shust has exhibited at institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art, GfZK (Leipzig, DE), Badischer Kunstverein (Karlsruhe, DE), Contemporary Art Museum S.M.A.K. Jura Shust (Belarus, Maladzyechna) lives and works in Berlin. Shust’s practice merges sculpture, video, and installation to construct mental landscapes illuminated by ethnoreligious beliefs and flooded by biopolitical intentions. The sacral idea of incorporation of the human mind into a global network, with its tendency for decentralization, inspires the artist to redefine the concept of spiritual ecology. Intrigued by semantic polysemy, informational intoxication, and initial desire for oblivion, he reflects on how the mythological overlaps with the technological.

Jura Shust explores the relationship between ritual and escapism.

My family tree by two jura