Ornament of Masses
Ilya Kachaev

Ornament of the Masses is a collection of essays by German sociologist and cultural theorist Siegfried Kracauer. In the essay that gives the book its title, Kracauer explores the processes of dehumanization and the atomization of people in consumer society. The presented project similarly focuses on the geometrization of society, examining examples of crowd formations turning into symbols. At the core of this artistic investigation lies the correlation of observation points—the transformation of masses into an object that can only be viewed from the outside.

In his work Ornament of the Masses, Ilya Kachaev develops this idea, which he initially shared in a group chat during a workshop concerning a collective exhibition. His installation invites the viewer to question what they are seeing and participating in, offering the opportunity to change both the distance and direction of their gaze. The exhibition can be viewed from the "stage" area as well as from the second floor, where the Hall was traditionally reserved for spectators. Each element of Ilya’s work addresses this trajectory of looking—from within and from outside—and its limitations. In his video piece, the artist performs a post-production intervention into the existing video documentation of Anastasia Ryabova’s performance Zvezdny Prospect. The participants of the performance traced a star-shaped route through the city streets, unaware of the full trajectory with each individual step they took, while facing obstacles. Ilya, however, is fully aware of the route yet simultaneously incapable of living through it.