Ambiguities of Possession in the Administrative Imaginary

In The Elegy of Lost Traces, Irina Volkova converts the exhibition architecture of Atticus Art Gallery into a bureaucratic reliquary — not to memorialise the disappeared, but to submit disappearance itself to administrative analysis. Suspended between historical intimacy and institutional opacity, this 2024 exhibition unfolds as a controlled system of access delays, visual redactions, and procedural grief, staged within the modulated greys of archival simulation.

Central to the installation is a sequence of framed carbonised documents, each a pallid residue of bureaucratic form: smudged, overprinted, faded into illegibility. Their serial arrangement suggests audit, inventory, or evidentiary compilation — but Volkova fractures that logic through material corruption. Printed onto heat-sensitive substrates and subjected to recursive thermal alteration, each page behaves not as record but as performance: a ritual of erasure enacted through the language of recordkeeping.

The left wall opens with a triad of forensic display panels, visually echoing didactic museology but denying any clarity of classification. Terms appear: “genealogical error,” “custodial lapse,” “confidentiality protocol.” Yet their co-presence is neither explanatory nor linear. They behave as disjointed metadata: extracted from legal systems, obsolescent user manuals, or corrupted evidence logs.

What punctures this greyscale regime, and does so with calculated provocation, is a replica of Girl with Peaches — the 1887 portrait by Valentin Serov, here painstakingly repainted by Volkova with a precise but dissonant fidelity. Its insertion is not nostalgic, nor reverent. It is tactical. Situated at the vanishing point of the gallery, the painting operates as a misfiled image — an affective anomaly that refuses to conform to the exhibition's cold procedurality. Yet its inclusion is not an error but an intervention into the politics of cultural possession.

By selecting Serov’s canonical image — historically mobilised as a symbol of Russian youth, innocence, and national softness — Volkova stages a friction between the archive’s sovereign gaze and the girl’s resistant presence. Unlike Serov’s original, where the sitter leans gently toward the viewer, Volkova’s version embeds the portrait within a regime of surveillance: backgrounded by faint textural overlays, slightly miscoloured, the bow too sharp, the cheeks too matte. Her gaze meets the viewer not with tenderness but with administrative challenge.

Volkova’s aesthetic strategy resonates with what UK-based theorist Jemma Desai describes as “an ethics of misalignment” — a conscious refusal to resolve the friction between systemic legibility and embodied presence. As in Desai’s institutional critique, Volkova constructs a visual language that is not concerned with resolution but with rupture: works that withhold coherence in order to expose its coercive infrastructures. Her staging of erasure is not symbolic. It is infrastructural, procedural, and painfully proceduralised.

On the right-hand wall, ten nearly identical panels shimmer in minor tonal distinctions — as if printed from a collapsing registry database. Each is dated but undated, labelled but unlabelled, named only through missingness. We are left with an overwhelming sense of bureaucratic fatigue: a catalogue so exact in its process of removal that it becomes a monument to untraceability. The panels suggest a delayed request, a non-appealable appeal. Their optical hum aligns with theorist Morgan Quaintance’s ongoing investigations into opacity and autonomy — particularly his claim that refusal is not a withdrawal but a method of counterproduction. Refusal here is not inert; it is generative, operating through formal loops of withheld information.

Volkova’s refusal to deliver spectacle engages directly with curator and scholar Languid Hands' proposition that Black and post-Soviet contemporary practices are increasingly turning toward “slow hostility” — an affective and durational withholding that frustrates the viewer's extractive tendencies. In this reading, the exhibition is not a site of viewing but of waiting: for access, for permission, for names that will never appear.

The presence of Girl with Peaches — altered, out of place, and insistently there — folds Volkova’s work into what Eliel Jones terms “the administrative imaginary”: the psychic infrastructure of paperwork, formality, and enforced delay. By reproducing a portrait traditionally coded as intimate and familiar, then embedding it within a hostile epistemology, Volkova undermines the very notion of cultural inheritance. Possession, here, is not a question of owning but of enduring being held — inside a system that may never release you.

What Volkova posits is not a disappearance due to absence, but a disappearance instituted through excess — of classification, of administrative overlayering, of procedural redundancy. Her archival aesthetic resists any notion of transparency. Instead, she invokes what Dutch theorist José van Dijck calls the medial memory apparatus: not the past itself, but the structuring of its legibility. Volkova’s works are not mnemonic but infrastructural — artefacts of the systems that govern remembering and forgetting alike.

The gallery itself behaves as a shell of institutional gesture: fluorescent neutrality, sanded white walls, zero emotional invitation. This architectural stillness — echoing the post-critical installations analysed by curator Taylor Le Melle — is not passive but disciplinary. It regulates attention. It trains the body to expect denial. Through this, The Elegy of Lost Traces achieves a rare atmospheric tension: not the aura of an art object, but the charged air of an unfulfilled request.

Volkova converts Atticus Art Gallery into a holding cell of exhausted information. The silence is procedural, not poetic. The lights are neutral, the sequencing deliberate, the affect — withheld. It is this very flatness, this refusal of aesthetic climax, that renders the exhibition politically charged. In an age of forensic overload and digital permanence, Volkova insists on the power of misregistration, the dignity of lost traces, and the radical potential of being unpossessable. The Elegy of Lost Traces was curated by Thomas Bloor and organised in partnership with Eastside Projects, Birmingham — a collaboration that further underlines the exhibition’s commitment to institutional critique and spatial reprogramming within the UK’s post-industrial cultural infrastructures.

Atticus Art Gallery, 11a Queen Street, Bath BA1 1HE, United Kingdom

Dates: 12 April – 25 May 2024

 Tom Denman, residing in London, is a distinguished freelance art critic whose perceptive articles have featured in eminent publications such as Art Journal, ART PAPERS, ArtReview, Art Monthly, Burlington Contemporary, e-flux, Flash Art, Ocula, and Studio International. He earned his PhD in Italian Studies from the University of Reading, focusing his research on Caravaggio and the noble-intellectual milieu of seventeenth-century Naples. Presently, his critiques primarily explore the subtleties and emerging trends within contemporary art.