Hesitation Marks

A project exploring speech “punctuation” as it emerges through body, landscape, and environmental interactions.

The exhibition will be temporarily closed for the Caesura performance on 22 and 30 March, from 15:00 to 16:00 and from 19:00 to 20:00.

The title of this exhibition, Hesitation Marks, reveals the common thread shared by punctuation marks and hesitation in their role of signalling pauses and interruptions within communication. Punctuation marks are used in text to indicate pauses, intonations, and accents. Thanks to them, the written word acquires the qualities of speech, or at least hints at a physical dimension. Undoubtedly, speech is a bodily phenomenon, and its somatic nature is most evident when it breaks down: when we are out of breath, painfully search for words that are “on the tip of our tongue,” or swallow words due to haste, anxiety, or embarrassment; when we turn to unconscious gestures, giggles, stuttering, and spasms. In a figurative sense, speech has its own “hesitation marks,” but unlike punctuation marks in a text, they do not provide assistance. Hesitation marks in speech rather embody a conflict or show resistance against the environment. At the same time, language as an abstract structure encounters hesitation in the form of the untranslatable or inexpressible—which also often manifests itself physically.

This exhibition emerged from observations of speech hesitations, when the smooth flow of sentences suddenly stumbles and breaks into awkward attempts, manifested in gestures, to find the right word to express a thought. We invited the artists to reflect on the meaning and value of this disruption. In works created specifically for the exhibition, the break in speech and bodily reactions appears as a productive shift that reveals the fundamental structure of connections between word, body, and meaning, allowing something new to emerge.

— Elena Yaichnikova, curator

The central theme of the exhibition is stumbling, or “hesitation,” materialised in marks whose forms are based on their connection to (con)text. For some artists, these marks look like figures of bodily resistance, or, conversely, of synchronization with spatial or temporal limitations. Sometimes, they are like membranes separating real and fantastic worlds, serving as communication interfaces that transmit and hold messages. At other times, these marks are traces of the past hidden in landscapes, preserving memories of both human and natural activity (or inactivity). Some marks are difficult to interpret or are completely indecipherable, as they intentionally highlight minimal but significant differences between environments. These marks may even interrupt the flow of time, like pauses in poetry, opening access to other rhythms—the forgotten, the lost, and the unfulfilled.

Hesitation Marks can be viewed as an experimental platform for working with various types of membranes that shape presence and movement in the environment, functioning sometimes as boundaries, sometimes as interfaces (notice the screens, glass, chrome surfaces, and light variations). All works here have a performative component and are either extended in time or capture a certain duration: these are video works, installations animated by performances, graphic representations of sound waves, or, for instance, an otherworldly flow of quasi-speech signals activated by touch. In these flows, there are always strange delays, obstacles, incongruities, and im/possibilities, experienced viscerally and valuable in their specificity. But be careful: each of them aims to reassemble your internal boundaries as well.

— Lera Kononchuk, curator

In language, as in the body, obstacles are never purely negative: they form a structure that generates beats and movements, and sets a direction—and also shows the need to change that direction.

Leaflet 

All photos: Daniel Annenkov

Artists

Liza Bobkova — Anna Garafeeva — Maria Romanova — Eugenia Suslova — Gentle Women (Aleksandra Artamonova, Evgenia Lapteva)

Contributors
Danil Akimov, Dina Borovik, Yulia Gorbunova, Nikita Goynov, Arman Gushchyan, Evgeny Ivanov, Sergey Koltsov, Vladimir Markov, Sergei Meshcheryakov, Asya Mukhina, Alexey Narutto, Stanislav Nikolaev, Trofim Popov, Irina Provorova, Egor Savelyanov, Pavel Stroganov, Aleksandr Sudaev, Anna Ushakova, The Vaults Centre for Artistic Production staff (Lyuda Frost, Sergei Kalinin, Artur Kodochigov)

Curators
Lera Kononchuk, Elena Yaichnikova

Architecture
Sasha Kim

Lighting
Ksenia Kosaya

Producers
Maria Kalinina, Veronika Luchnikova

Technical team
Andrei Belov, Artem Kanifatov, Artem Marenkov, Nikita Tolkachev

Art logistics and registration
Daria Krivtsova, Daria Maksimova, Daria Pankevich

Editors
Grigory Cheredov, Aleksandra Kirillova

Accessibility and inclusion team
Aleksandra Kharchenko, Vlad Kolesnikov, Victoria Kuzmina, Varya Merenkova, Vera Zamyslova

Graphic design
Max Maslov

English texts
Simon Patterson

All artworks were commissioned and produced by GES-2 House of Culture

Media specialist
Katya Kiseleva

Information partner