Viktor Timofeev’s “Other Passengers”

At the heart of Viktor Timofeev’s first solo museum show is a white castle tower. It stands alone in the darkened and otherwise empty main space of this three-room show, projecting light upon the ceiling. The glass floor of the gallery, through which the museum’s permanent collection can be glimpsed in the space directly below, is partially covered with amorphous vinyl shapes that suggest that this tower is floating, impossibly, over the clouds. Peering over the crenelated sides of the structure, or stooping to look through a small window set into its outer wall, enhances the feeling that the viewer has been transported to a fantastical elsewhere. Inside the tower is a 360-degree oil painting whose bright red buildings and cloudy, washed-out skies contrast the stark white of the sculpture’s exterior. Running on a circular track around this landscape, endlessly looping a spherical lamp, is a toy train.

The sense that time has been suspended or is out of joint—a journey endlessly returning to the same half-remembered terrain—pervades this exhibition, combining painting, installation, music, and moving image into a dreamlike scenography.1 At the room’s far end are two smaller spaces containing life-sized replicas of train carriages, complete with pleather seats, tables, fitted carpet, and “windows” in which videos are screened. Those in one room show footage shot from the front of the toy train, the other from the rear: taken together, they offer a Janus-faced view of the same painted scene as it ceaselessly approaches and recedes, playing with the viewers’ sense of place and scale—have they just teleported inside the toy train? Projected onto the walls are peculiar, elliptical clocks whose symbols mutate with every passing second, heightening the sense of uncertainty. So too does a sound piece by Miša Skalskis that plays in both rooms. Filled with murky orchestral music and muffled noises, it seems to emanate from some other space and time.

Timofeev’s previous works are underpinned by an architectural sensibility in which built environments are mined for their psychological as much as formal qualities. The urban terrains depicted in his drawings, paintings, installations, and computer games are often futuristic, even utopian-seeming in their construction yet destabilized by eerie energies. Buildings multiply into irrational, hive-like spaces or are invaded by tentacular growths or ghostlike figures. This oneiric mood is here extended into the gallery, suggesting that, in this particular architecture, the viewer is the ghost.

The active scrambling of any reliable frames of reference—linguistic, symbolic, historical, even architectural—suggests an attempt to capture the affective and psychological texture of migration and memory, how it feels to traverse both national and historical boundaries. (This suggests a partially biographical reading: Timofeev was born in Latvia, studied in Europe, and lives in New York.) In that sense, “Other Passengers” brings to mind recent books, among them Svetlana Boym’s The Future of Nostalgia (2001), Svetlana Alexievich’s Second-hand Time (2013), and Georgi Gospodinov’s Time Shelter (2020), that examine the aftereffects of profound historical changes, notably the collapse of the Soviet Union, on the minds of those who survive them, and who may fear—or long for—a return to the way things were.

Boym writes that nostalgia is not always directed to the past but rather “sideways,” to an idealized elsewhere that is elusively located between “home and abroad, past and present, dream and everyday life.”2 “Other Passengers” seems to inhabit a similar in-between terrain. The animated clocks, with their mutating symbols, suggest that amnesia and nostalgia are linked: the past must be forgotten in order to be reformulated. On the train carriage tables are scattered pages where recently departed travelers—the “other passengers” of the title, perhaps—appear to have been writing a note, or decoding a letter, in the same alphabets that appear on the clocks.

The cryptic, open-ended nature of this show is likely to frustrate viewers looking for clues as to how the pieces fit together, what the shifting symbols mean. This may be part of the point—to heighten the yearning for meaning in a context of unending contingency. In place of definitive explanations are parallel views, double meanings, and ambiguous mirror images. Trains evoke contemporary migration, childhood toys, the passage of time, and the genocidal logistics of the twentieth century. The clocks’ changing symbols point to the hieroglyphics of vanished civilizations and to an uncertain future determined by iterative language models. “Other Passengers” invites the viewer to dwell in a suspended place, an endless journey, where meaning is perpetually sought and forever out of reach: a castle above the clouds.