National Gallery of Armenia

Light has a fundamental significance not only in art but generally in life. Light is not only a physical description of items, but also a spiritual category. It not only makes the reality visible, but also brings the secret qualities and properties of a human soul. The exhibition “Light from Inside” by Tatiana Daniliyants (Russian-Armenian photographer, sculptor, filmmaker and poet), living in Moscow and Venice, is exactly about that physical and metaphysical light.
The project being exhibited at the National Gallery of Armenia, simultaneously includes the artist's two exhibitions which have been presented in the halls in Russia and Europe for many times. “Venice. Afloat” and “Anima Russa/Russian Soul” photo exhibitions are meant here which embrace the artistic photography and sculpture made of Murano glass. The project “Venice. Afloat” through the artistic photography tells not only about the boats - the most important Venetian transportation, but it is also about the existence of light-color in Venetian unique space (of water, reflective). According to Vitaly Patsyukov, a prominent curator and an art critic of Moscow, “… by creating a new visual and informative image, Tatiana Daniliyants’s photographs make modern the tradition “Russian pointlessness” though in a different and non-traditional painted form: it gets reflected coloring in the artist’s poetic world and recovers “the lost time”. Tatiana Daniliyants’s reference to the subject of urban environment of the artistic re-comprehension such as boats brings new breath to the iconography and urban environment of that wonderful city”.
The second project included in “Light from Inside” exhibition is “Anima Russa/Russian Soul”. Here Russian traditional lollipops “traveling” in a series of ancient cities near Moscow (Mozhaysk, Zvenigorod, etc.) and becoming the conversation “subject” between the artist and other people encountering during their travel, acquire immortal lines turning into sculptures made of Murano (Venetian) glass, thus uniting Venice, Italy and Russia.
The documentary element of the project, the photograph, which intends a reportage shooting, becomes mysterious and archetypal thus uniting past, present and future before our eyes. The project was initially created to be in the prominent Italian curator Adriano Berengo’s Venetian gallery. His opinion about that exhibition was as follows, “A part of Daniliyants’s works is almost documental and is distinguished by non-traditional approach towards her compatriots’ lives, their habits and lifestyles, while her works made of Murano glass make a bridge to Italian culture and habitants of Venice. That is why I would expand the exhibition name and add “anima mundi” in quotes to underline the connection with world soul which unite people. The author speaks about it, doesn’t she?”The invisible metaphysical light outcoming of the participants of that project, the light of their “souls’ or “physical” light floating in the depth of lollipop-sculptures made of Murano glass, or the light reflected in the water playing on the surfaces of canals and gondolas and turning into colour, all these make us again and again reconsider the inexhaustible nature of that phenomenon.

 Tatiana Daniliyants’s Biography