By peering into a peephole and listening to distant sounds, we inadvertently recreate the reality in our memory, balancing on the verge of presence and absence, visible and invisible. The image is here and, at the same time, it greets us from some distance — as the sound of ocean contained in a seashell.

The opacity of a visual picture — here a black and white photograph, altered by the optics of the peephole and as if “enlivened”, and the vagueness of sounds presumes that the spectator would involve his own archives and drag up his own feelings and associations from the nooks and crannies of his memory. And the less real and “anecdotal” the story about the reality is, the more plausible it sounds.

In Belova’s Archive, the memory of the body is evoked through sound. Here, the artist invites each visitor to peer through peepholes in uniform wooden boxes and discover found photographs of entry halls leading into old Saint Petersburg buildings. Each box is equipped with a set of headphones, connecting the viewer with the sounds of life in each of the represented buildings — the casual hum of music, the quick fall of steps, fragments of conversations, the slow drip of water through aging pipes. The physical infrastructure of the box creates an infinite distance between the viewer and the viewed — audio-technology becomes the primary tool that bridges this gap, connecting the vision to the body and creating a nostalgic reminder of a particular time and place.