In the game “the floor is lava”, both danger and safety are turned into topography of the imagination. Viktor Petrov’s installation is built upon the inherent principles of this game, which apply only within the drawn boundary of the four walls: naïve and violent impulses unfold at full force, physics is suspended, reality and reason are torn from their bounds. Beyond it – the floor is lava. The exhibition evokes primal fears and thus also our existential longing for shelter. This shelter, however, is not a physical place – it is rooted beyond the world of the tangible and remains reserved only for oneself, similar to the soft architecture of a blanket that serves as a fort, a tent, or a shield pulled over the head. Protection is improvised, always provisional.
Viktor Petrov
The Floor is Lava
The installation is staged like a dream sequence abandoned in haste: its narrator has fled, and with them the timeline and the subject. What remains are objects that sit in unstable dimensions – sometimes too small, then slightly too large. They stand in for familiar things, such as plants, common objects, or structures, yet they dissolve into their modular compounds – perforated plates and screws. Like in a dream, the work moves from concrete to abstract, from playful and friendly to austere and threatening.
The visitor navigates through this shifting terrain with one question in mind: safety or threat?
The exhibition “The Floor is Lava” by Viktor Petrov is part of the BAZA Award for Contemporary Art, received by the artist in 2023.
The exhibition is realised with the support of the Trust for Mutual Understanding.
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Viktor Petrov was born in 1991 in Pleven, Bulgaria. He lives and works in Berlin. He studied at the University of Art and Design in Halle, Germany, as well as at the University of the Arts in Berlin, where in 2021 he completed his studies under prof. Monika Bonvicini. His work explores the relationship between the social, the architectural and the body politic. His installations and sculptures reveal power dynamics inscribed in objects, structures and interpersonal relations. The starting point of his long-term projects are different types of structural violence and their banalized forms of manifestation in everyday life.