Artworks presented at the “Goodwin”* group exhibition show persons. These images are perceived by the viewer as “you-concepts” and urge the viewer to come up with “I-concepts” in response. The artists focus on difficulties of communication and initiate situations of looking at the image of the other, which can cause sensations of unreality, deficiency or excess. Heightened attention to persons is often explained as culturally and historically conditioned and inevitable in the discussions about the present (due to social networks, tracking, service industries’ profiling of customers). At the exhibition, obsession with persons is interpreted as always individually chosen and situational search for oneself in one’s views on others. The curator believes that the works shown are ambivalent: they dwell in detail on the appearances - unrealistic imaginations of oneself and others, still they suggest a way out of the mist of imaginations to direct communication.

*Goodwin is the name of the Wizard of Oz in the Russian re-narration of L. Frank Baum’s children’s novel.