For over five years now, Sergey Kolosov has been exploring the visual possibilities of glass. In his practice, he employs objects with a pop‑art accessibility and a St. Petersburg‑style nostalgia drawn from the archaeology of the recent past: incandescent light bulbs or medical cupping jars. He cuts, glues, breaks, glues again, and listens to what these resulting hazardous objects whisper to him, what content condenses on the walls of this transparently glittering, flagrantly decorative form. His method is characteristic of the realities of Russian contemporary art: the time for demonstrating a coherent authorial position and an articulated statement has already passed / has not yet arrived, and in the meantime — let the medium speak. It must be said, Kolosov's glass refracts light at a rather grim angle: it shatters into portraits of politicians and criminals from the past, foaming with glass; into reflections on half‑lives; into everyday objects like a bed or a door, blistering with sharp shards.

This time, the fragments have coalesced into a series of objects that narrate a strange place: part memorial, part sanctuary, part arsenal, part trophy room. Such territories/collections are often created by the aggressive heroes of dieselpunk movies, like Mad Max or Fallout: an ugly post‑apocalyptic world trying to remember what the religious‑glorification practices of the old world looked like. The distant resemblance and the obvious glitches vividly demonstrate the scale of the damage inflicted on culture and souls. There is another cinematic reference (in the exhibition's title): a Hong Kong action comedy (Armour of God) released the year the artist was born. In it, members of a secret religious society — Satanists obsessed with commercial sex and drug dealers — try to seize ancient military relics, the destruction of which, according to legend, is supposed to plunge the earth into chaos and hand it over to the forces of evil. In a world where evil has won, someone is trying to remember what once protected them from it and, even if in the form of a cargo cult, to restore a magical protector.

What, then, does the glass tell us, having taken shape in the forms of busts, chain mail, carapaces? Probably about the fragility of the forces restraining catastrophe, about self‑fulfilling prophecies scattered through mass cult, and about the necessity of hope despite everything.

Alexander Dashevsky