Reading Rämistrasse #182: Oliver Cretton on Vladislav Markov at Bernheim

The gallery has been shrunk. Two walls running parallel to the façade condense it into a narrow corridor — a gallery, in the older sense of the word. Outside, nothing betrays this: the façade is closed off, a vitrine with nothing to show.

Inside, the paintings are scaled to a room that no longer exists, sized for the gallery as it was, rather than the gallery as it is, and there is no position from which a viewer can step back far enough to take any of them in whole. Perspective collapses. You are always too close.

The images serve as a table of contents, hints of what is to come: a studio, a car, an actor, each a 3D mesh, all surface and no interior, everything visible, nothing inside. It is the viewpoint of the viewport: simultaneous, total, a perspective nobody in space could occupy; seeing all faces of an object at once, and what it surveys, naturally, are simulacra.

Beyond the gallery, a large dark room opens up: carpeted, open, soft beige underfoot. Two pillars punctuate the space. In the far corner, a kitchen: the only source of light in the room, lit by nothing but its own appliances. There is a television in the kitchen corner. You have already heard it from the entrance — the further in you go, the more it comes towards you, gradually displacing whatever sound you carried in.

The kitchen is recognisable as such, but something is off. The machines only partially work — the ventilation hangs unconnected to any duct. The oven is on, but not hot. The fridge door is open, the light is on, but it isn't cooling anything. Both ajar. No heat. No cold. No molecules were excited in the making of this show.

Time has either stopped, or never started. The kitchen is dated, early 2000s, somewhere, hard to place exactly. There is no way of knowing how long it has been like this, or whether it occupies a dimension where that question applies at all.

The room reads as American to me; the carpet, the size, something about the kitchen floor. But it is American the way the simulacrum is American: generic enough to belong nowhere in particular.

The kitchen wasn't dropped into the gallery; it was constructed. Plasterboard, countertop, appliances, all built in the space and dressed to look as if they were found there — signs of maintenance here and there, marks that simulate a history rather than record one. Not readymade but made ready, and made ready for nothing in particular.

Duchamp could lift the urinal out of the world and put it in the gallery because there was a world to lift it from. When reality has been replaced, there isn't a stable elsewhere to displace from. Vladislav Markov hasn't displaced anything; he's rendered.

A woman came in while I was there, with her mother and her children. She had seen the artist's Russian name and wanted to know whether the kitchen would look like the kitchens of her own Russian childhood. The gas stove reminded her of her kitchen growing up.

Caution: Objects in this mirror may be closer than they appear! — Jean Baudrillard, Amérique

The phrase appears three times. It is the epigraph to Baudrillard's Amérique. It was the title of Markov's last show, in New York. And it returns here, spoken, inside the video on the screen inside the kitchen. Amérique, for all its diagnostic precision, was a love letter to the country it described; the show operates in a similar register, attending to a condition rather than condemning it. The four people in the video face the camera; facing us, watching us watching them.

A screen, the kind that sits inside a car, plays the forty-two-minute video. Four people are in a car, waiting for it to charge before driving to a funeral. They don't know each other; the conversation drifts towards nonsense. The structure is Beckettian: the wait as form, the wait with nothing on the other side.

In the New York show, viewers stood behind one-way glass and watched constructed performers in a constructed strip club. Here the arrangement is reversed, the video's point of view is the rear-view mirror, and the figures face us. The same voyeurism, almost reciprocated.

There are glitches, now and again. Figures lean or reach in a way that suggests a fight is starting, and then the scene resolves as though nothing had happened. The video has the texture of surveillance: fixed camera, night, the long uninterrupted shot. The glitches give the surveillance something to almost-be-recording, they make the footage look like it could be of something, even though it isn't.

On the way out, I notice a blood splatter on the carpet, the only imperfection on the floor. I want to think it isn’t part of the show. An intrusion of the real, anyway.

The kitchen has activity without event. The video has footage without anything to be recorded. The stain is the only thing that won't be cleaned up by interpretation.

Whose blood, when, why? The show offers no answer.

Vladislav Markov, LOCATION.LOCATION.LOCATION., Bernheim, Rämistrasse 31, 8001 Zürich, 23 April–29 May 2026.