THE DONG WITH A LUMINOUS NOSE
Fons Welters Gallery
9 September 2017 - 21 October 2017

The Dong with the Luminous Nose borrows its title from the nonsense poem by Edward Lear. The poem follows the abandoned Dong, who wanders a shoreline, longing for the lost Jumbly Girl and invents a device to illuminate his grief: a strange prosthesis known as the luminous nose. In a similarly oblique manner, Vasiljeva touches upon grief, madness, eros, displacement and fragmentation allowing these states to drift through the installation, rather than settle into explanation.

The dark architectural structure titled Mr. Krop Is Not At Home, in the centre of the installation, gestures toward the Dutch urban designer Hildo Krop, whose sculptural reliefs appear throughout bridges and buildings in Amsterdam, not far from the gallery. An echoed cabinet form associated with Krop becomes a container for traces of a brief stay: clothes, personal items and a small domestic lamp, suggesting a provisional shelter.

Temporality continues to echo through other elements. A large paper trench coat lies across the floor resembling a fragile tent. An aged mattress carries private markings while ceramic forms evoke the remains of bunker ruins.
The Dong with the Luminous Nose unfolds as an environment of objects, scents and sounds, where overlapping stories remain partially visible like clues left behind in a shifting landscape.

The installation is accompanied by a soundtrack composed by Vasiljeva and the OAOA and recorded on tape.

Photos by Gert-Jan van Rooij