The latest piece from contemporary artist Katya Shkolnik is saved on a USB stick and ‘trapped’ in an acrylic cube – will its collector ever break it open?

Nuclear engineer to artist may be an unusual career path, but it’s exactly how Katya Shkolnik’s has transitioned since 2007. Her main medium is photography, and her pieces are concerned with clarifying the invisible, with exposing what we often cannot or choose not to see.

“Where the scientist has plenty of big, fancy equipment at their disposal, I have the camera,” she says, “And I use it to collect information in the same way, to look at the layers and angles, the vibrations which surround us.”

Her most recent work takes the notion of art-as-commodity to playful new levels. Believe Me, It’s Beautiful is the product of immense technical planning, and takes the form of a solid acrylic Plexiglas cube. The USB stick sealed inside it contains information on one of Katya’s most beautiful photographic compositions, along with the full rights for its reproduction, instructions for its printing and how to hang it.

The piece has never been published before and, depending on the buyer, it may never be. To access the USB means destroying the cube – something that can only be achieved with a certain level of violence: “We ran several tests beforehand to make sure the information was secure,” she says. “It’s in a special chamber, but you’d need to use an electric saw to get to it.”

Katya Shkolnik: "If that cube isn’t broken, the work inside it will never see the light of day." Credit: Katya Shkolnik

Finding beauty

There is a decision to make here: one encapsulated by the slogan running across the bottom of the piece: “You can have this. You can have that. You can not have both.” As Katya says, you cannot have both.

The piece’s premise, then, is whether the audience will “trust” Katya’s assertion of the hidden work’s beauty, or instead decide to acquire what they can see before them, resisting their natural curiosity about the USB’s contents. This interest in the power of human inquisitiveness, and the lure of owning something potentially “more beautiful” than the intact piece itself, is a key feature of Katya’s portfolio.

“When people acquire an artwork they acquire satisfaction,” she says. “With this piece, you’ll be slightly dissatisfied in either case.” There’s a compromise to be made: the symbolic storage device can be appreciated in its own right, or it can be put to technical use.

Unique perspectives

Katya works solely with a digital camera and is not a studio photographer, specialising in “the full spectrum of light, when the camera can collect as much information as physically possible” during the daytime. Born in Moscow in 1972, she graduated just as the Soviet Union was collapsing. Having earned her degree as a master of science, she worked at the foreign ministry in Kazakhstan before deciding in 2007 to pursue her lifelong ambition and train as an artist.

“When I was a kid I was always drawing,” she says. “My mum was an engineer as well, but she studied painting via a correspondence course. We had a cupboard full of art books – these were difficult to source back in the Soviet Union, and we treasured them. They were seen as sacred.”

So what does she hope the collector of Believe Me, It’s Beautiful will choose to do? Katya exhibited the piece at Saatchi’s START Fair in September, and asked her audiences whether or not they’d decide to break the glass: just 20pc said they would.

“I have the same cognitive dissonance as everyone else. If that cube isn’t broken, the work inside it will never see the light of day,” she says. Her next work, Believe Me, It’s Inappropriate, will surely present a similar conundrum to prospective collectors: will they retain the tangible object they see before them, or pursue the digital information hidden inside it?

Discover more

Read more about Trust Me, It’s Beautiful and about Katya Shkolnik’s life and work at katyashkolnik.com

