Nevermore Nevertheless
Sasha Marshani
curated by Giulio Verago

Edicola Radetzky, viale Gorizia - Darsena, Milano

A year after his residency at Viafarini, Russian artist Sasha Marshani presents for Edicola Radetzky a cycle of large-scale drawings that mix personal memories and collective trauma, echoes of the past grafted with dystopian visions of the future.

The artist's imagery is loaded with symbols related to conflict and contradiction;
the untranslatability of the experience of those who leave their country and the spontaneous discovery of small urban epiphanies.

In the works, the boundary of the sheet becomes the demarcation of a trench, the torn page offers the illusion that there is a single sense of reading while in reality a sense of multiverse vertigo prevails.

Over the past year the artist has lived in different countries because of the ongoing war in Ukraine, exploring Milan and Tbilisi with the attitude of a flâneur, continuing to question the condition of uprooting and the ambiguous origin of memories.

The very concept of propaganda is based on the reversal of reality into its opposite. The political manipulation of the narrative creates the basis for justifying a collective hallucination based on homo homini lupus.

Sasha Marshani is an artist but also a publisher, founder of Samopal Books, an independent zine and art publication platform, as well as a researcher of European underground publications and in particular Soviet Samizdats.

The term literally means "self-published," and was coined by Russian poet Nikolay Glazkov in opposition to the Stalinist regime's press to define the hand-copied publications that gave rise between the 1950s and the collapse of the USSR to veritable underground libraries.