Ludmila Belova
Eternal Present

Video Installation, 2023
TV monitor, frame; video [00:06:18, color, sound, loop]
“Because we go and beauty stays. Because we are headed for the future, while beauty is the eternal present. <...> Aesthetic sense is the twin of one's instinct for self-preservation and is more reliable than ethics.” — Joseph Brodsky, "Watermark"
The fragility and vulnerability of human life, its brevity and finiteness are questions that torment a person, everyone is looking for their own answers. The consolation in this kind of reflection is beauty. The beauty of nature, art as a kind of "beauty".
Rainer Maria Rilke wrote "For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror". The horror is that beauty remains in the eternal present, in eternity, and man gets only a moment.
The installation "Eternal Present" is a monitor inserted into an antique frame and looks like a painting hanging on the wall. On the "picture" you see, reminiscent of abstraction, a composition of bright spots. There is a close-up view of a fragment of a natural landscape. At a distance of two steps, this picture should surprise with color and composition. But, from a closer distance, the strange movement that takes place on the screen among these bright spots is recognized and it becomes clear that under the layer of leaves and shells of shrimp, armies of worms move in their eternal movement.
