What would a social morphology of a contemporary human reveal – ideally an urban dweller, pinned like an insect? For Alexander Tarasenko, an artist who dissects burnout, identity and the pressures of the social body, such anatomy would be structured from patterns of neuroses and fears. And although these patterns are likely unique to each individual, together they stitch an expansive psychic map of contemporary society, in which anxiety functions as its default navigation system. 

Tarasenko draws on his own experience of cultural shock and adaptation, using lived experience as grist for what presents itself as a healing spectacle. In the installation “I Have Many Times Tried To Become An Insect. But I Was Not Equal Even To That” (2025), shown at “Conviction Fair” at Hypha HQ, a human figure impaled on a spike locates a paralysis: the gap between thought and action, the inability to break the cycle of habit and the resulting impossibility of any progress. For an individual suspended between dread-filled future and longing for the past, a calcified mode of being becomes a kind of totemic spine, at whose base lies a heap of hopes, dreams, each resembling an egg that never hatched.

The installation also serves as the site for the performance “The Green Lizard Boy”: Tarasenko, in an act of auto-vivisection, is tied to the totem pole, offering his own body as the price of desired transformation. It’s unsurprising, then, that in another performance of the same series – descending his cross and crawling out of the gallery onto the street – he merely trades one form of helplessness for another, landing in the pathetic symmetry of a beetle flipped onto its back. To be reborn as an insect is not transcendence but an entry into a new darkness, only hyper-sensitized. 

The involuntary spectators – passersby, passengers alighting from a bus – wear expressions of indifference or incomprehension. Crawling beyond the white cube, Tarasenko confronts those who never sign up to empathize. The body on the pavement registers as a threat, or an obstruction, or someone else’s problem. Yet this indifference is neither a failure of communication nor a diagnosis of society: urban dwellers long ago built tolerance for one another’s crawling, with no gallery required. Looking away is the same habit, only without the totemic illusion that one might someday step down from it.

In the urban conditions we continue repeating learned movements, even while fully aware that repetition obstructs progress. This captivity within a temporal loop is expressed more succinctly and, for once, precisely (already an achievement, since precision in art is no small thing) in the video “It’s Stronger Than You” (2019-2025), where Tarasenko’s hand for twenty minutes chalks the sequence 1-2-3 on a board, erasing it in a spasm of disgust, promising to stop, writing it again. 1-2-3, every time the last time. Given another chance, a human will, of course, waste it again. The video’s crucial intuition is that the desire for transformation (self-liberation, salvation) curdles into an obsession, another neurotic pattern… And yet it becomes the very trap the performance walks straight into. In “I Have Many Times…” Tarasenko converts it into a manifesto, bets self-liberation on transformation, and ritualizes the whole thing as if the staged form might save what the content already disproved.

In the triad of human, society and nature Tarasenko assigns the latter the role of prosthetic of desire, rather than a foundation to build from or a presence to locate within himself. Nature functions here just like the totem pole: a cultural artifact dressed as something archaic; the insect a metaphor dressed as biology. In seeking to decipher the secret structure of the psyche through the borrowed carapaces, Tarasenko short-circuits a more fundamental mystery: his own existence. This is, at bottom, the same charge one might level at the institution of art itself: it paints in overly vivid colors what is already legible, especially from less mediated environments, out in the open, naturally.

Anxiety, neurosis and shame are not, as Tarasenko believes (and he is far from alone in this) taboos imposed by the city on difficult-to-articulate states. They are symptoms of chronic untimeliness, the result of endlessly postponing the radical act in which a person stops describing their own unfreedom and begins to take responsibility for it. Art, unfortunately, rarely brings that moment closer; more often, it offers a sophisticated substitute. By using the body, Tarasenko injects hope into the closed loop. But hope, as he himself once demonstrated, is just another behavioral pattern. So the sequence reboots, 1-2-3, and we continue crawling.