Inna's Dream. Varvara Shavrova

About

 Shavrov was a gifted tinkerer and a tireless, meticulous inventor. A dreamer, for sure, but one that made a dream come true. In the 1930s, he designed the first Soviet amphibious aeroplane. He did this in the comfort of his own room in a communal apartment. Named after Shavrov, the Sh-2 was the first Soviet mass-produced flying boat capable of carrying two crew members as well as one passenger. A light, simple and reliable design. Shavrov was a man of many interests. In addition to his studies and research, he was also a collector of insects, with a comprehensive set of bugs that he examined down to the finest detail. 

But who are the other protagonists? There is Alexander, Inna’s father and Vladimir’s brother. He was a military pilot and the first to test the Sh-2. He was arrested and sent to the Gulag where he died. Inna’s Dream is not only about the ingenuity of an invention. Shavrova’s project tacitly implies the relationship between two brothers whose destinies evolved in distinctly different directions. And then there is Inna. She’s the one dealing with the trauma of the survivor, a moderator on her own quest for truth who keeps control of the strands of the stories; the real stories and those invented, the whitewashed transmissions and also the well-kept secrets. 

In Varvara Shavrova’s fourth solo presentation at the gallery, the USSR-born artist is re-enacting a major installation. Initially presented as part of her Masters project for the Goldsmiths MFA Fine Art Degree Show in 2019, Inna’s Dream is a continuation of Shavrova’s ongoing confrontation with her family’s history, asking persistent questions about power, authority and representation – of the male and the female - as well as the interface between individual and collective history. 

Installed in the semi-domestic setting of Patrick Heide Contemporary Art, the project returns to its origins having been designed in a comparable environment and thus enabling the viewer to directly experience the absurd idea of building an aeroplane in an apartment – as a theoretical, unrefined concept, an actual object or the proverbial elephant in the room. Varvara’s version of the Sh-2 is scaled down and re-made as a three-dimensional textile body, but it has not lost any of its magnitude and complexity. The hand-tufted set of individual components takes on proportions of 7 by 5.5 meters and is completed by a site-specific wallpaper drawing – a reminder of Shavrov’s apartment as the birthplace of this first Soviet amphibious plane. Presented alongside the installation is a series of scroll-like drawings on wallpaper that feature the technical specifications of the aircraft, portraits of Shavrov and images of insects.