Ephemerality Exploring the aspect of the numinous through a review of Nina Kraviz's eponymous debut

Sensual, sexual, ephemeral but inescapable, Nina Kraviz has created something truly beautiful and unique; something that approaches a numinous experience.

The deepest of house reminds us of our most buried and intense memories and dreams, leading us on, a definite will-o-the-wisp, forcing us to trudge ever onward through the muck, to sail through the mist, a siren's call that leads us onto the rocks.

It's briskly walking through the freezing streets of Moscow at 3am, walking quickly because of the howling gale and the bitter cold, but never running because that would be undignified. To be more accurate, it is likely more Murmansk or Irkutsk than Moscow, but the lights are of the boutique stores and the inescapably grim albeit everyday realities that contrast sharply with the dream-like opulence displayed to the public. The contrast of a drunk with a glimmering shopfront: all in this mist, all while actively trying to go somewhere and being purposeful about it but without actually having anywhere to go.

Just because something lacks an exact purpose, it doesn't mean that it's not worth the effort, because even if something lacks a precise meaning, it can still have style, definition, effect, poise. And we do and so we go, and we move onward, and we try to reach for the green light and our respective simultaneously ambiguous and precisely defined lofty aspirations.

And we change ourselves, now less Zeligs and more Bulgakov, and we immerse ourselves in culture and literature and high art and buy expensive scarves because we tell ourselves that this is what we do when we seek that elusive self-definition. We put ourselves on impossibly likely tangential paths that will lead to nothing positive but something definitively revered and we think we are so clever, and we are so foolish and it's all insane but that is life.

We must take risks and make stupid decisions and live in order to feel fulfilled. We need to fuck and it must be meaningless in order to dissipate the brooding sense of the fact that something is wrong. We need our pills, we need our thrills, we need to get ourselves up and bring ourselves down. We need coffee, cigarettes, cashmere, chairs and couches, Cîroc till closing time, cocaine, until we are the cancer and then it's cytostasis. And we stop and we go, what the hell is the point? But would you rather die safe, bored, and alone or at a wild feast with all our friends and all these random people having the time of your life with just a small dash of cyanide?

Choices.

© 2024 Bogdan ZADOROZHNY