Photo: Miro Kuzmanovic

"Crossed path" (2022)

 

 

In his work, Viktor Petrov uncovers conditions and factors that usually remain invisible behind their spatial or social structures. The sculptor's two-part work in the exhibition „Zwischen Raster“ at DOCK20, shows two different modulations of a grid - as a paper collage and as a plaster porcelain sculpture.

 

A starting point for the work "Crossed path" is the pen-and-paper game "Battleship". The game had emerged around the time of World War I and quickly gained popularity among soldiers. Today it is known mostly as a children's game. Petrov juxtaposes the grid as a supposedly highly functional and neutral organizational structure to the variety of individual decisions that take place in its frames. However his focus lies less on their psychological, but on their mathematical dimensions.

 

So how can human behavior be mathematically described and what are the consequences of digressions in our behavioral patterns? Petrov asked several friends and acquaintances to play "Battleship". The 64 playing sheets were then evaluated and fed into a 3D modeling program. The graphic model was milled in wood and finally cast in stone plaster, thus incorporating both the structure of the wood and the traces of the milling head on its surface. The outcome of this transformation process resembles an architectural landscape, which shape drives both from the individual decisions of the players and the grided space they took place in.

 

 

Wall installation: acrylic glass, aluminum profiles, paper

Room installation: steel pipes, plaster porcelain, pipe clips (stainless steel)

 

64 x 64 x 1,8 cm ; 100 x 100 x 100 cm