Through films, photo performance, land art, and textual works, Andrey Shental explores such subjects as dialectics of nature’s domination, cross-species communication, and the evolving relationships within the natural world. Drawing on influences ranging from Frankfurt school theory and ecosexuality, Shental incorporates his own body as a site of negotiation with nature, blurring distinctions between self and environment. In his video works — spanning documentary, 3D animation, and found footage — he lends a voice to non-human agents such as fungi, technological objects, water bodies, and landscapes, treating them not only as fully-fledged interlocutors, but also as political actors.
DOMINATION OF NATURE
series of photos and essays (2024 – present)
"Domination of nature", the phrase often used by Theodor Adorno, is indeed ambiguous. One usually assumes that it simply means "over" (humans exert mastery over the natural world), but in fact "of" suggests, conversely, that nature dominates us. This series of slow motion performances enacted in the natural environment depict different BDSM mise en scènes using paraphernalia from marketplaces. The representation reverses the conventional anthropocentric hierarchies: the natural objects and processes start taking mastery over the human body that is rendered submissive and vulnerable. Invasive species (wild cucumber), endozoochorously dispersed seeds, and wasp-produced paper pulp transform it into a vehicle for their own dissemination.
in collaboration with Janna Tatarova
SUB DROP
exhibition project (2024)
Playing with fetishist aesthetics, Andrey Shental’s solo exhibition Sub Drop shifts focus from the technical domain to ecosexuality. It stages human–nonhuman relationships as a dynamic power play that mirrors how the notion of the sublime landscape was traditionally described in western philosophy. In the competition of capacities, such as between the wide, storm-raged ocean and the insignificant observer, the might of reason was nevertheless thought to triumph over natural forces. But what if we reverse this dynamic and see Homo sapiens sapiens as a mere drop in the dark and raging water? By placing humans in a submissive (sub) role and natural phenomena in a dominant (dom) one, can we overcome hubris and potentially embrace a more modest position in the world?
photo by Agustín Farias
photo by Agustín Farias
photo by Agustín Farias
photo by Agustín Farias
VENERA-13
video-installation (2019 – 2024)
Outer space has always been a screen for humanity's political ideals, often reflected in science fiction. Venera-13 presents an alternative perspective on space exploration, shifting away from traditional narratives of human dominance. Set against the backdrop of the Soviet mission to Venus in 1982, the film explores the unconscious motivations behind space technology, giving voice and agency to the machinery involved. At the heart of the story is the lander Venera-13, a spacecraft descending onto Venus's surface, equipped with a pioneering pre-digital camera invented by the artist's grandmother, scientist Margarita Naraeva. This camera, known as "telephotometer", worked for two hours and managed to capture the first colourful images of the planet before dying due to harsh climate conditions. Through a dramatic dialogue co-written with the artist's grandmother, the film unfolds the tragic tale of this non-human protagonist. This Farockian "suicide camera", personified as a rebellious machine, undergoes various stages of self-cognition and realisation of its role in the Cold War-era space race. As the conversation progresses, the camera confronts its purpose and the exploitation it facilitated, shedding light on the broader themes of visual colonialism and militarism embedded in technology of industrialised vision.
LIKE PRODUCE LIKE
photo performance series (2018 – present)
his body of work lies at the intersection of photography, performance,
land art, and selfie culture. Examining the dynamic interplay between natural environments and external forces, the artist stages and self-documents his actions. These photographic pieces blur the boundaries between human and environment, merging the artist’s body with the landscape and attributing human-like agency to wildlife. Through mimicry, the artist explores a dissolution of self into the surrounding environment. According to Roger Caillois, mimicry is not merely a defence mechanism but a "dangerous luxury" of identification with nature, operating on the principle that like produces like.
photo by Michal Ures
photo by Ivan Erofeev
photo by Michal Ures
MOSCOW — BEIJING
photo series, installation (2019 – 21)
The series of self-portraits made near Moscow, on the construction site for a road that will presumably connect the Russian capital to Beijing, explores the "apocalyptic" aspect of the construction project, which leads to deforestation, destruction of meadows, and the diversion of the irrigation system into pipes. The construction of the highway began in spring 2019, just a few meters away from the house where Shental grew up and still lives today. The ambitious project for "the new Silk Road" was conceived in the Soviet era and will connect the capitals of "the raw material (oil) and plastic empires": two of the biggest Eurasian cities, neither of which has direct access to the sea and both of which arose historically as tax and administrative centers established by nomadic invaders to collect tribute from settled people.
Photo by Ivan Erofeev © Garage Museum of Contemporary Art
Photo by Ivan Erofeev © Garage Museum of Contemporary Art
DESCENT INTO THE FUNGAL
two-channel video, installation (2016 – 17)
The work consists of constantly alternating plot lines. In the first video, generally known scientific facts and the latest discoveries in the field of mycology are laid out in a popular manner. In the second, this subject is interleaved with the utterances of the fungal bodies themselves, which declaim something akin to their own particular manifesto. This combination results in the revelation that the relationships fostered by the fungi with their surroundings (through mycorrhizae, parasitism, saprotrophy and endophytia) refer unambiguously to contemporary political programmes for a coming world order, proposing a unification of forces in the fight against capital. The film also plays with the homology between mushrooms and the Internet – another popular subject of mycology. The natural becomes the digital, and vice versa. As a constant reminder of fungi’s presence in the world, the video monitor stands beside a sculptural element representing the living fungal organism, starting and completing its life cycle again and again.
Photo by Peter Tijhuis
Photo by Robin Roger
FERVENT REVOLUTIONARY WOMEN
digitised 16mm film (in progress)
This film is dedicated to the women who participated in revolutionary struggle, political terrorism and feminist movements before and after the October revolution. Based on reprinted archival photography and shot against picturesque landscapes, it explores the obsolescence of images and erasing of historical memory as if through the process of organic deterioration. It features figures such as the first terrorist and theorist Vera Zasulich, socialist revolutionary Maria Spiridonova, who spent most of her life in prisons, feminist and the first female ambassador in the world Alexandra Kollontai, "rock-hard" Bolshevik Rozalia Zemlyachka, who allegedly participated in the red terror, Ukrainian anarchist and guerrilla Maria Nikiforova. The film analyses five different configurations of femininity and how they undermined the dominant patriarchal order.
ON KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION
powerpoint-presentation, voiceover, installation (2013)
This work examines the overproduction of knowledge and the contemporary forms of neurosis that arise from the constant consumption of information. At the core of the project is a collection of actual tickets, preserved as material remnants of "immaterial" events—exhibitions, symposia, films, and panel discussions—that I have attended worldwide. The prices displayed on these ephemera highlight the commercialization and commodification of education, a trend amplified after the Bologna Process, which was initially resisted by art institutions but perhaps ultimately reinforced through the "pedagogical turn". The installation includes both the growing ticket collection and a pseudo-theoretical lecture—a PowerPoint presentation—offering a narrative of personal obsession with knowledge production.
PINTURAS NEGRAS
16 mm digitised, 6' (2012)
In the early 2010s, with the proliferation of smartphones, Russian media was full of alarming news about children bullying and beating each other up. Many of these incidents occurred solely to record and disseminate the resulting videos through social networks. The film analyses the dissemination of these images and documentation of violence on the web and our relationship with new digital media. While the title refers to Goya's famous series, the footage combines classical paintings with low-quality found footage, tamed and aestheticized through celluloid. This work questions the innocence of various media and technologies of representation in the post-digital age. Are we committing a crime merely by watching a person being beaten or killed, simultaneously recorded by the aggressor? Are new technologies of documentation and dissemination synonymous with a collective act of violence, or do they merely epitomize our growing alienation from "analogue" reality?
ANASTASIA'S STORIES
documentary video, 26', (2010 – 11)
We met Anastasia Georgievna in 2007 and were captivated by her talent as a narrator, reminiscent of Benjamin's lamentation over the lost art of storytelling. The film represents her stream of consciousness, where personal memories intertwine with literary narratives, village stories and biblical parables. The main protagonist, who at that time lived in a decaying flat in one of Moscow's most luxurious buildings, had once enjoyed a successful career as a house painter in the Soviet era, decorating the homes of major USSR ministers.
After Perestroika, she was left alone in her flat, which she filled with various memorable and curious paraphernalia. In our film, the surrounding objects also take on roles as narrators in their own right. The chaotic plotlines Anastasia Georgievna tells are mirrored by the objects around her; for instance, stars transform into hotplates and lamps, and vice versa. The juxtaposition of her exalted speech with her actual living conditions reveals what could be described as the "human" dimension that persists despite the challenges and changes of personal life.
in collaboration with Katerina Beloglazova
