The Nettle Nun’s Cell

An intervention exhibition

Media: sculpture, graphic art, photography, video, artist’s book, sound, text
Location: Set Projects Gallery (Moscow)

«The Cell of the Nettle Nun» is an intervention exhibition where different genres and forms of art intersect and balance at the junction: graphic art, photography, video, object, text — becoming a single organism, a living being with a pulsating artery of poetic and sonic essence.
Unlike the usual exhibition focus on predominant visual perception, the project offers a special kind of experience, involving the viewer in the process of listening to the fabric of the artwork. Whether it’s a sculptural composition of dense nettle foliage made of metal, a fairy‑tale installation of hawk‑moth figurines with the faces of Perm wooden deities, photographs of a ghostly abandoned temple, or the music of violets’ whispers, pearl fields and celestial birds.
A colourful enchanted place with a dense twilight forest all around, a melancholic grove, a charming shimmering river and a field drowning in flowers — like a boundless paradise playing with all the shades of silver and deep blue. It is especially beautiful in these expanses at the hour of evening sunset, when the golden sun transforms from shining scarlet into its own milky‑misty shadow, disappearing beyond the horizon of melting existence.
Here hide age‑old walls, prayed upon and sung by the free winds, having absorbed the incantations of rustles and the whispering of grass. Listen closely: here is primeval silence and there are no people anymore, yet their voices resound, and there are crystal memories hovering in the air of consoling hope.
What remains after us, in the garden where the lilac bloomed so splendidly and that nettle burned with its sparks? In the lands of paradisiacal bliss, there is only one divine force, fragments of which are the sacred memory of something infinitely greater.
Even in the darkest times, there is always a place for light — one that must be learned to see and accept. Like in a pearl cell by the shore of deserted waters, a mythical space standing guard over history and beauty. Isn’t this the very purpose of art?

Within one great culture, there are many shared artistic motifs, root narratives, and structural features. And artists sometimes arrive at common solutions and goals that continue from century to century, as if woven by invisible threads of unity of meanings and epochs — where all are equal: grasses, people, nature, and the incorporeal spirit.

Curator: Anna Yakubova

Gallery: Set Projects (Moscow)

The exhibition includes a series of sculptures made of metal and pearls (size: 180×65 cm, 15 objects), video documentation of site‑specific installations in the ruined Church of the Icon of the Sign of the Mother of God and in Lake Ilmen (4 min), an artist’s book with photographic documentation of the site‑specific installations and the author’s text written with a needle on tracing paper (20 pages), a series of sculptures made of ceramic and pearls (30×30 cm, 15 objects), and a graphic series created using needle embossing on tracing paper (10 works).

2026