The One I Know was written in the wake of Mom, Can We Talk?, my solo exhibition at FUTURO Gallery in Moscow in July 2026. The exhibition grew out of an attempt to think about closeness between mothers and daughters, and about the strange difficulty of encountering someone we already know intimately. The essay returns to its images, materials, and spatial encounters to ask what it might mean to make room for another person — in a space, in memory, and within what we believe we know about them.
There was no water in Mom, Can We Talk? There was no reason to take off your shoes. The metal leaves were not lying at the bottom of a pool, and there was nothing there to hurt bare feet. There were, after all, no bare feet to hurt.
But before long, I began to feel as if I were standing barefoot on the cold tiled floor.
There was no water in Mom, Can We Talk? There was no reason to take off your shoes. The metal leaves were not lying at the bottom of a pool, and there was nothing there to hurt bare feet. There were, after all, no bare feet to hurt.
But before long, I began to feel as if I were standing barefoot on the cold tiled floor.
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The gallery is lined with white tiles. The space feels like either a drained swimming pool or a public shower. Small metal objects hang low above the floor, almost weightless, their edges thin and rather sharp. They are perfectly safe. And yet around them, you find yourself placing your feet more carefully.
If you come to the gallery and find yourself there alone, your body quickly slips into a strange mode set by the space. You feel slightly uneasy and begin to move more carefully. Everything around you seems very fragile — and somehow, so do you. A friend of mine said that inside the exhibition she felt almost naked and very vulnerable. Looking at her reflection in the mirrored surfaces, at some point she could no longer tell whether she was seeing herself or her mother, or which of them was looking at the other.
Mom, Can We Talk? is built around encounters. The project grew out of an impossible encounter and the desire to talk about what happens when you desperately want a conversation that will never take place.
It all began with memories of coltsfoot leaves: how, as a child, I loved rolling their downy skin between my fingers; how we gathered them to make a remedy for sore throats; and how the plant’s strange Russian name, mat-i-machekha — “mother-and-stepmother” — fascinated me. Coltsfoot leaves have two very different surfaces. One is smooth and cool; the other is soft and velvety.
If you come to the gallery and find yourself there alone, your body quickly slips into a strange mode set by the space. You feel slightly uneasy and begin to move more carefully. Everything around you seems very fragile — and somehow, so do you. A friend of mine said that inside the exhibition she felt almost naked and very vulnerable. Looking at her reflection in the mirrored surfaces, at some point she could no longer tell whether she was seeing herself or her mother, or which of them was looking at the other.
Mom, Can We Talk? is built around encounters. The project grew out of an impossible encounter and the desire to talk about what happens when you desperately want a conversation that will never take place.
It all began with memories of coltsfoot leaves: how, as a child, I loved rolling their downy skin between my fingers; how we gathered them to make a remedy for sore throats; and how the plant’s strange Russian name, mat-i-machekha — “mother-and-stepmother” — fascinated me. Coltsfoot leaves have two very different surfaces. One is smooth and cool; the other is soft and velvety.
What caught my attention was the strange logic of the leaf: two surfaces that feel completely different belong to the same body and can never meet. I tried to hold this impossibility in the metal leaves. On one side, I printed cyanotypes from my family archive. The images were enlarged and cropped until sometimes only part of a face or body remained: you might recognize or guess at someone’s features without being sure who you are looking at. I polished the other side of the metal to a mirror finish. Something new appeared on its surface each time — the gallery, a beam of light, the reflection of someone approaching the work. The image would never quite settle: even the slightest movement made the photograph disappear and your own reflection emerge; the reflection disappeared, and the photograph returned.
For the project, I chose photographs of my mother and me, both of us at around thirty. I wonder: would we have become friends? What would we have talked about? What would we have found in common?
For the project, I chose photographs of my mother and me, both of us at around thirty. I wonder: would we have become friends? What would we have talked about? What would we have found in common?
In psychoanalytic thought, the relationship with the mother is one of the earliest ways of thinking about how we become separate: gradually learning to distinguish between “me” and “not-me,” inside and outside. Here, becoming a separate person happens not despite our closeness to another, but within our relationship with them — through a boundary that allows one person not to be the other. But separateness is never something we can simply stop thinking about. With those closest to us, we are constantly moving closer and further apart: recognizing ourselves in another, discovering differences, wanting to be understood without having to explain ourselves, while resisting when someone else seems too certain that they know us.
This creates a strange contradiction: closeness alone is not enough for an encounter to take place. Difference is necessary too. What matters to me is how to be close enough to belong to the same story, yet separate enough for an encounter to remain possible. How to give another person a place beside me, and sometimes inside me; to let them change that place and to be changed by their presence — while still leaving enough room for them to turn out to be not quite the person I expected to meet.
This creates a strange contradiction: closeness alone is not enough for an encounter to take place. Difference is necessary too. What matters to me is how to be close enough to belong to the same story, yet separate enough for an encounter to remain possible. How to give another person a place beside me, and sometimes inside me; to let them change that place and to be changed by their presence — while still leaving enough room for them to turn out to be not quite the person I expected to meet.
When we speak of the maternal, “receiving another” can be understood almost literally: as giving them a place inside one’s own body. Yet the maternal body has long been imagined as a passive receptacle, a space in which […] In Hospitality of the Matrix, Irina Aristarkhova brings back into philosophical discussions of hospitality something that has been curiously absent from them: the matrixial, the maternal, and the female body itself. Hospitality usually assumes that a place already exists, and that a host opens it to another. The maternal unsettles this model: here, the place made for another cannot be separated from a woman’s bodily labor and experience. It does not exist in advance as a ready-made receptacle that can simply be opened or closed. It is created for the other and with them, changed by their presence while also taking part in shaping them. Aristarkhova thus restores agency to what has traditionally been imagined as passive and receptive.
A space that receives has a temperature, boundaries, particular qualities. What matters, then, is not only that another is received, but how. It is impossible to give someone a place without affecting them in some way — and impossible to truly make room for another while remaining entirely unchanged by their presence.
A space that receives has a temperature, boundaries, particular qualities. What matters, then, is not only that another is received, but how. It is impossible to give someone a place without affecting them in some way — and impossible to truly make room for another while remaining entirely unchanged by their presence.
In Mom, Can We Talk? this question became a double one for me. I was interested not only in how the space receives the person who enters it, but also in what kind of place we give another person within a close relationship — in our memory, our language, our idea of them. Closeness, after all, also means that another person is in some way held within our life. And the longer we know someone, the more detailed and complex this inner place becomes. But at what point does knowing someone begin to define their boundaries for them? Is it possible to leave room, within our idea of someone close to us, for what we do not yet know about them?
While gathering material for the project, I asked my mother who she means now when she calls me by my old name.
While gathering material for the project, I asked my mother who she means now when she calls me by my old name.
“You — my daughter, the one I know.”
There is no mistake in this sentence. She knows what I was like as a little girl, what I loved and what I was afraid of; she remembers my face, my habits, her own versions of events that I may not remember at all, or may remember differently. She gave me a name and raised me with it.
The problem does not begin when one person knows nothing about another. What happens when they know a great deal is far more interesting.
The problem does not begin when one person knows nothing about another. What happens when they know a great deal is far more interesting.
What does it mean to hold another person in memory, in a name, in love, in our idea of them — without denying them the possibility of being more than what we know about them?
A mirror, too, is built on recognition. We look into it expecting to see a familiar face, and it quite convincingly promises to return us to ourselves. But a reflection never belongs to the person looking alone. Alongside them appear the wall behind them, the light, another object, part of the room. The mirror rearranges the architecture, returning fragments of the space from another angle, shifting scale and perspective.
In Mom, Can We Talk? this became especially apparent. A person would try to see their own face inside an exhibition about a mother and a daughter, and at the same time find themselves drawn into an already existing system of images and relationships. Sometimes the coincidence was almost literal: one's own reflection merged with the work, vanished with movement, reappeared. It was impossible to hold it in one position.
In Architecture in Abjection, Zuzana Kovar proposes abandoning the familiar model in which the human body and space exist separately from each other. For her, an event arises within a temporary configuration of forces: body and space do not remain unchanged participants in the encounter but are themselves assembled and reconfigured within it. And so the boundary between them does not necessarily exist in advance — it, too, can emerge and shift within what takes place.
In Mom, Can We Talk? this became especially apparent. A person would try to see their own face inside an exhibition about a mother and a daughter, and at the same time find themselves drawn into an already existing system of images and relationships. Sometimes the coincidence was almost literal: one's own reflection merged with the work, vanished with movement, reappeared. It was impossible to hold it in one position.
In Architecture in Abjection, Zuzana Kovar proposes abandoning the familiar model in which the human body and space exist separately from each other. For her, an event arises within a temporary configuration of forces: body and space do not remain unchanged participants in the encounter but are themselves assembled and reconfigured within it. And so the boundary between them does not necessarily exist in advance — it, too, can emerge and shift within what takes place.
In the metal leaves, too, the boundary between the two surfaces changed with the viewer's position. While I stand before one side, the other remains hidden: to see it, I have to walk around the object, losing sight of what I saw a second ago. But there is one more possible point of view. If you stand edge-on to the object, excluding both surfaces from your field of vision, it almost disappears. Instead of a leaf, there is a thin metal line, like the blade of a knife. And the harder I try to take up a position from which I see neither side, the more distinct the boundary between them becomes.
Yet it is impossible to see the work whole from a single fixed point. What I call the object is put together each time from the surface I see now, the memory of the one that has just left my field of vision, and my own movement around it. Sometimes the boundary is barely noticeable. Sometimes it turns out to be all I am able to see. But moving around the object does not make the two surfaces coincide. The cold one does not become warm, nor the soft one smooth. The boundary's mobility does not cancel out difference.
Yet it is impossible to see the work whole from a single fixed point. What I call the object is put together each time from the surface I see now, the memory of the one that has just left my field of vision, and my own movement around it. Sometimes the boundary is barely noticeable. Sometimes it turns out to be all I am able to see. But moving around the object does not make the two surfaces coincide. The cold one does not become warm, nor the soft one smooth. The boundary's mobility does not cancel out difference.
But the longer I think of the encounter as a relationship between me and another, the less this structure explains what was happening in the exhibition itself. Even a simple encounter between a person and a work never took place between the two of them alone. Taking part in it were the distance to the object, the height at which it hangs, the light, the white tiles, the reflective properties of the metal, the person's movement through the room. And along with that person, their own memory and experience entered the situation.
I want to be careful here not to say that all these elements simply influence how the work is perceived. Influence still implies that somewhere there is the work itself, and around it, circumstances that slightly alter how we see it. But in some situations I find it hard to separate what happened from the specific configuration in which it became possible.
My friend described standing in front of the mirrored surface and no longer being sure whether she was seeing herself or her own mother. I had not put this image into the mirror. But it also seems insufficient to say that she simply brought it with her. Without her own history, this experience probably would not have happened. But neither would it have happened without the mirror, the family photographs, the metal, the light, the gallery space — or the body that found itself in front of that reflective surface at that particular moment.
I want to be careful here not to say that all these elements simply influence how the work is perceived. Influence still implies that somewhere there is the work itself, and around it, circumstances that slightly alter how we see it. But in some situations I find it hard to separate what happened from the specific configuration in which it became possible.
My friend described standing in front of the mirrored surface and no longer being sure whether she was seeing herself or her own mother. I had not put this image into the mirror. But it also seems insufficient to say that she simply brought it with her. Without her own history, this experience probably would not have happened. But neither would it have happened without the mirror, the family photographs, the metal, the light, the gallery space — or the body that found itself in front of that reflective surface at that particular moment.
In Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett suggests looking for action not in any one participant in a situation like this, but in the connections between them. For her, matter is not simply a passive backdrop to human action: things and their properties also take part in shaping what becomes possible in a particular situation. This matters to me not because I want to call a metal leaf or a mirror a subject. Rather, this way of thinking makes it difficult to decide in advance what is acting and what is merely a backdrop, a material, or the vehicle of someone else’s action.
After the exhibition, I can no longer fully predict what kinds of connections the work might enter into. The metal reflects light not only when or how I intend it to; a photograph encounters someone else’s memory, architecture encounters a body, a reflection encounters someone who recognizes in it something I have never seen.
Perhaps that is why I keep thinking about the water that was never there.
After the exhibition, I can no longer fully predict what kinds of connections the work might enter into. The metal reflects light not only when or how I intend it to; a photograph encounters someone else’s memory, architecture encounters a body, a reflection encounters someone who recognizes in it something I have never seen.
Perhaps that is why I keep thinking about the water that was never there.
In one of the installation photographs, it appeared almost literally. A dark round mirror was reflected in the white tiles; the image broke apart along the grout lines, light distorted the surface — and suddenly the ceiling looked as though water were moving across it.
So who made the water?
I could say that I saw it because I know what a swimming pool looks like. But that is not enough. Without the white tiles, the mirrored surface, the light, the grout lines, the position of the camera, and my own bodily recognition, this image would not have existed either.
This is where another consequence of Bennett’s thinking becomes important to me. Distributed agency does not mean that human intention disappears, or that every participant in a situation acts in the same way. I did make this exhibition: I chose the photographs, the metal, the scale of the works, and the way they were installed. The viewer does arrive with their own memory and experience. But neither the artist’s intention nor the viewer’s interpretation can fully account for what the material situation between them is capable of producing.
So who made the water?
I could say that I saw it because I know what a swimming pool looks like. But that is not enough. Without the white tiles, the mirrored surface, the light, the grout lines, the position of the camera, and my own bodily recognition, this image would not have existed either.
This is where another consequence of Bennett’s thinking becomes important to me. Distributed agency does not mean that human intention disappears, or that every participant in a situation acts in the same way. I did make this exhibition: I chose the photographs, the metal, the scale of the works, and the way they were installed. The viewer does arrive with their own memory and experience. But neither the artist’s intention nor the viewer’s interpretation can fully account for what the material situation between them is capable of producing.
Over the course of working on the exhibition, I lost several of my initial certainties. First, I stopped being sure that an encounter takes place between two already existing participants in some neutral space. Then I stopped being sure that the boundary between them can be drawn in advance and will stay where it is. Finally, it became difficult even to say exactly who and what takes part in what happens, and to whom the outcome belongs.
Each of these shifts gradually made it harder for me to imagine an encounter as a moment when one person finally gains access to another. I began with the question of whether an encounter is possible with someone I believe I already know very well. Now I think the question itself contained an expectation: that an encounter should allow us to see another person as they really are, to close the distance between us, to refine or correct what we already know about them.
The metal leaf does nothing of the kind.
Each of these shifts gradually made it harder for me to imagine an encounter as a moment when one person finally gains access to another. I began with the question of whether an encounter is possible with someone I believe I already know very well. Now I think the question itself contained an expectation: that an encounter should allow us to see another person as they really are, to close the distance between us, to refine or correct what we already know about them.
The metal leaf does nothing of the kind.
Its surfaces never met. And they never will. While I look at one, the other remains invisible; if I try to position myself exactly between them, both disappear — all that remains is a thin metal edge. At first, this impossibility was precisely what I saw as the problem of the work.
Now it seems to me that for too long I mistook the impossibility of coincidence for the impossibility of encounter. Difference does not necessarily prevent an encounter: if it disappeared entirely, there would be no one left to meet.
Gradually, the very picture of the encounter changed as well. What came to matter to me was not only who meets, but everything that happens to be there with them: bodies, materials, images, memories, light, space. Together, they may become capable of something that could not have been expected from any one of them in advance.
There was still no water in the exhibition. But now I am less interested in where it came from than in what made it possible for the water to appear.
Now it seems to me that for too long I mistook the impossibility of coincidence for the impossibility of encounter. Difference does not necessarily prevent an encounter: if it disappeared entirely, there would be no one left to meet.
Gradually, the very picture of the encounter changed as well. What came to matter to me was not only who meets, but everything that happens to be there with them: bodies, materials, images, memories, light, space. Together, they may become capable of something that could not have been expected from any one of them in advance.
There was still no water in the exhibition. But now I am less interested in where it came from than in what made it possible for the water to appear.
Alexandra Pavlovskaya is an artist and curator based in Moscow. Working across photography, installation, and material-based practices, she is interested in how intimacy, memory, and relationships are shaped through bodies, spaces, and things. She received her BA in Fine Art from the University of Hertfordshire in 2019 and completed the MA in Contemporary Art Practice at HSE Art and Design School in 2024. Her solo exhibitions include Mom, Can We Talk? at FUTURO Gallery, Moscow (2026), and Tanyushka at FUTURO Gallery, Nizhny Novgorod (2023). Her work has also been shown in group exhibitions in New York, London, and Riga.