«...In her experimental short film The Stone Guest (Каменный гость) (2017–18), Marina Fomenko pieced together found footage of public celebrations surrounding the unveiling of statues of Lenin in the years after his death in 1924. The title of the film refers to Alexander Pushkin’s short play of the same name based on the legend of Don Juan (as part of the collection of short plays, The Little Tragedies, 1830), in which the stone statue atop the tomb of the commander whom Don Juan has murdered appears as a dinner guest and takes the libertine to the underworld. Pushkin’s Stone Guest speaks only three lines in the play — «You invited me»; «Leave her. All is finished»; and «Give me your hand» — yet its ominously silent, nodding presence functions as an undercurrent of moral conscience, just as Fomenko’s Lenin statues ensure the continuation of Lenin’s «stony grip» on the consciousness of the Soviet peoples. The film returns repeatedly to the moment of the statues’ unveiling, as the cloth covers are pulled off and left to float down majestically, revealing the figure of Lenin, again and again. The fluidity of the cloth is juxtaposed to the hardness of the stone (Figure 1), which in turn is underscored by the sparse and percussive soundtrack of the film. The historical footage shows the statues emerge as if from a chrysalis, lending them a performative quality — they seem to both commemorate and carry forward the birth of the Soviet spirit in the October 1917 revolution, seven years earlier. In their dual ability to both describe (commemorate) and to create what they describe (carry forward), the statues are performative in a manner more commonly ascribed to speech and gesture. Indeed, Deleuze and Guattari wrote in What Is Philosophy? (Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?) (1991), published in the year of the final dissolution of that same Soviet spirit, that «a monument is not the commemoration, or the celebration, of something that has happened; instead it confides to the ear of the future the persistent sensations embodying an event». These sensations — these «vibrations» or «embraces» — of revolution and of suffering, are themselves monuments-in-becoming, «like those tumuli to which each new traveller adds a stone...»

Sarah Collins «STONE AS WITNESS» in Angelaki Journal of the Theoretical Humanities

«Everything is always decided at the level of symbolic exchanges.»

Jean Baudrillard

In the art of Marina Fomenko the concept of «modus operandi» is treated as a kind of a creative vector shaping her repeatedly emerging reality so rich in inner meanings. In this sense her «modus operandi» actually comes close to Kazimir Malevich’s principle of «surplus element» which enables the artist to produce organic blends of visual and acoustic constructions while preserving intact the wholeness of her artifacts in their processionality. Marina Fomenko’s uninterrupted visual montage arrangements follow a dramatic direction, which is seemingly accidental and unpredictable, compelling the viewer to immerse completely into the artist’s distinctive iconology. Her art strategies make her «modus operandi» work as an ideal event occurring in perfectly regular everyday circumstances with their functional orientation towards discovering magic in ordinary human existence and creating a free flight within the zones of gravity. Infusing everyday happenings with lofty inspiration the artist, like Konrad Lorenz’s butterfly, crosses the borderlines of geographical and art territories to take part in shellfish fishing in Mexico or to meditate in the ancient Japanese capital of Kyoto. Her artistic gesture draws the viewer into the whirlwind of the dance universe and thus unites Madrid, Moscow and Venice with the acoustic path of Paolo Ricci and the giant seaport of Shenzhen in China. In her acoustic-visual works the artist as it were moves along the power lines probing each of its points and thus forming a profoundly personal construction which cannot be separated from the person, as a diagram or a draft. She weaves the natural fabric of her toposes without leaving the confines of their inner dimensions, and she makes it possible for the space to open up to the world and engulf us, to exist in the passive voice.

At the same time our own vision will discover in the video installations of Marina Fomenko a different optics and a different language. Her phenomenal images will then be perceived in their dynamic states as they lose their structural qualities and start glimmering, get out of focus along the peripheries, revealing a conceptual outcome beyond its apparently fixed limits. Within this system the structure of these video works obeys some special geometry, its principles formulated back in the 1970s by Benoit Mandelbrot who named them fractals. This is the geometry of the outlines of a cloud, or the crown of a tree, or a seashore line. Its forms enable us to visualize new states in changed conditions and in completely unpredictable coordinates of reality. The artist’s methods allow her to spotlight special contexts of large-scale events — close-ups or, conversely, outlines of the limitless micro-world, — and thus acknowledge the relentless march of Nietzschean ideas of «eternal return», and a cyclical understanding of historical and cultural progress. In view of this organic continuity of sound and image differentials and their mutual agreement the artist examines the free matrix of the universal artistic-genetic structures, which allow the absolutely new integrality to live on. Within their reliefs, depressions, niches, and elevations, within their lengths and durations the lost chronotope of the radical dialogue between space and time is being returned into contemporary culture.

What kind of project was total installation created by Marina Fomenko? Her project, called «Observation Station», was spread over five halls of the State Museum of Contemporary Art ofRussian Academy of Arts on Gogol Boulevard. And the word «total» was here in both literal and metaphorical sense. In first case we saw the installation, which occupied several rooms, and in second case, we spoke about a title which implies a system of «total survaillance» of a modern society, where every person is in the observation field of another person. Provoking a certain situation — in this case «relocatuion of the Observation Station» — the artist determined the certain «rout» within the installation space: from the @Accumulator@ through the «Isolation Ward», «Observation Point» and «Translator» to «Destruction Point». Here one could find yuorself in the middle of vicious cucle of getting information, its storage, transmission and destruction. The semantic space of the installation was so tense that you felt it phisically as an invisible presence of a hazard. «Big brother» is watching you — from video-windows, from screens, through the eyes of survaillance cameras, through the lenses of video-cameras. With all the lexical adequacy of the project, and its fairly modern way of expression, its concept and form of its representation were fairly unusial, and genre of total installation is still an exceptional phenomenon on the Russian art scene. Therefore, we wanted to clarify some interesting issues in personal interview with the author.

«Dialogue of Arts», № 5, 2010

«In the collection «(Non)strategies» by Marina Fomenko presented «Elements of Memory» (4 stories), «Dialogues» and «(Non)strategies», in a formal respect works on boundaries of video art, experimental video and visual poetry (especially with respect the letter work, in which author introduced video labels, thus defining a vector of image understanding by the viewrs). Presented works are multi-layered? not only in the literal sense but also as metaphorical sense.