Viktor Timofeev
DOG

March 5 – April 11, 2021
Opening Reception March 5, 2-9pm

Interstate Projects is pleased to present DOG by Viktor Timofeev, an installation of colored pencil drawings, a mural, and a self-playing game; all arranged within a fictionalized bureaucratic setting.

Within the drawings, figures writhe above architectural plans, their bodies stacking together to form shapes loosely evoking recognizable infrastructures. The three channel self-playing game, Chat, presents an automated questionnaire being executed by two digital avatars: an asker and an answerer. Beginning with the Roman alphabet, the glyphs on two tabletop monitors are systematically scrambled, quickly mutating beyond recognition. Hanging overhead, a third screen displays the same alphabet arranged around a clock face, its hands illustrating the process of encryption in real time. Stuck in a loop, the dialogue is effectively robbed of its potential for true interactivity: one of the accompanying keyboards is broken, and the other has a single key jammed. The game is left to play itself, endlessly feeding identical responses to increasingly illegible questions. DOG appears to have been abandoned by its users, whose abrupt departure is frozen in time.

Viktor Timofeev (b. 1984 Riga, Latvia) is currently living and working in New York. Timofeev has recently had solo exhibitions at MX Gallery in New York, Karlin Studios / Futura in Prague, kim? Contemporary Art Center in Riga and Alyssa Davis Gallery in New York. Group exhibitions include The Latvian National Museum of Art in Riga, Den Frie in Copenhagen, Stroom Den Haag in The Hague and Bozar in Brussels. Timofeev is the co-founder of No Moon, an event space co-run with nihiti and is the host of Sibling Gardens, a bi-monthly radio program on Montez Press Radio.

COVID-19: There will be a Soft Opening Reception from 2-9pm on March 5th and the gallery will be open from 12-6pm Saturdays, Sundays and by appointment throughout the week. Visitors must wear masks in the gallery spaces at all times and there will be masks and sanitizer available onsite. There will be a limited number of visitors allowed in the spaces and social distancing of six feet will be required. Our courtyard garden will be open for the duration of the exhibition.