CLOTHO

The walls of the Worsted Factory, a place that houses Tatyana Ahmetgalieva’s installation in one of its shops, invite thoughts about fabrics and threads and their symbolic importance.

The idea of Clotho was born out of the antique myth of Moirae, the Greek goddesses. The first of them, in the guise of a spinner, embodied the unswerving and dispassionate course of fate; the second Moira represented its vicissitudes, and the third impersonated its ineluctability.

The name of the spinner was Clotho; she used her yarn to thread present-day events and each mortal’s destiny determined at the moment of his or her birth. Clotho is also the name of a recently discovered human gene responsible for keeping one young and beautiful.

Tatyana Ahmetgalieva’s project is a multi-dimensional canvas, with faces appearing through the transparent drapery. The ethereal world of the divine is savagely stabbed through with a breathing woollen thread.

The close-up views of female faces, sketchy and completely see-through, are the images of the Worsted Factory’s actual workers who have devoted their entire lives to this work and, as it were, turned into these very goddesses.

They keep spinning the multitudinous threads of human lives, transmitting everything through their own selves in order to weave the rough fabric of today.

The white threads of other people’s lots, the lumps of their hopes, the entangled bits of their intertwined life stories extend, permeating the exhibition area, and coil into the spools piled up on the floor…