ERASE ME
On this page, within this project, you receive the right to become my censor or my protector - to destroy my seventeen-year artistic career or protect it from destruction.
In front of you are buttons for managing my life. This is not a joke and not a simulation.
Deletion concerns my website, Instagram, and Facebook. Archive files remain my property: I do not destroy them, but I may not publish them under my own name for seventeen years. I am not responsible for third-party publications if someone else independently posts photographs of my works. Physical originals that remain in Russia are not affected by this transaction - I do not have access to them anyway.
The buyer of deletion rights receives a censor certificate - documentary confirmation of the decision. The buyer of insurance receives a certificate that secures protection for the selected project against this kind of deletion.
At present the project exists as a total web installation on the scale of my life - without physical form and in constant development. It may later acquire a material embodiment, but its current state is entirely digital: a virtual carrier produces real consequences.
I was born in Russia, in the late USSR. Censorship was a background from childhood - in literature, family stories, cinema, and journalism. Soviet power turned damnatio memoriae - the erasure of memory - into a method of governance. Unwanted people were cut out of photographs, removed from encyclopedias, erased from credits and textbooks, as if they had never existed.
I learned this lesson early and once applied it to myself. From 2000 to 2010 I developed a music project, then voluntarily and completely left it, asking to remove myself from annotations, articles, and mentions. With one simple action I deleted ten years of my creative life.
Since 2010, working as an artist, I have also censored myself - removing projects from my portfolio when they seemed too sharp, refusing authorship when a work became dangerously public. Curators, naturally, helped me with this by periodically making it quite clear that work of this kind could not be realized.
The culmination was emigration. The decision to leave saved me from some consequences, but at the same time erased my former public identity. Reputation, connections, professional history, and portfolio that had existed for years in Russia became almost meaningless in a new country. I became a person without a past.
For me, Russian censorship did not end with self-censorship of individual works - it ended with the removal of myself from the space where my artistic biography had been formed.
ERASE ME is an attempt to live through again what I have already experienced voluntarily and involuntarily: disappearance as an action I know how to perform on myself and now hand over to someone else for money.
In essence, this is a total participatory installation on the scale of my whole life. Everyone who pays to delete or protect a work becomes a co-author of my artistic biography - not metaphorically, but literally rewriting its future course.