MishMash: the Hideous Intervention

MishMash, “The Future of the Past.” Installation view, 2025. Mixed Media. (Courtesy: MishMash).

MishMash is a nomadic duo consisting of Misha Leykin (b. 1968) and Masha Sumnina (b. 1977). While they had started working together in Moscow in 2000, the name itself was imposed on them around 2001 in New York, where they have lived and worked for three years.

Their newest exhibition in XL Projects Berlin (Berlin, Germany) is an open baroque theatre that is wedged inside the artists’ workshop, which this space really is. A fold in reality that offers us a game of make-believe, not pretending to hide or substitute whatever is there on the other side of plywood walls: crevices are left intentionally gaping, all the hardware, partly assembled objects, and other stuff are there to be seen. It is an attempt at deceit that can’t fool anyone. Where the skies should be, waves of gauze; decorations made of found objects on the walls. The scene is receding, as if seen through reversed binoculars, and has only enough space for a single person.

One-man vocal performances are sometimes held during the show, occupying this narrow scenic space. The opening included singing by Lisokot, who composed a baroque epigram in homage to the echinus, an architectural element inspired by the sea urchin.

Lisokot performing at the opening, 2025. Audio performance, mixed media. (Courtesy: MishMash).

In the absence of performers, a dark round shape is seen in its middle. A black hole is the punctum of the whole construction. And if this thick dot can escape the eye, its counterpart is more than obvious. A large black ball, positioned right in the middle of the auditorium, is suspended from the ceiling. One has to move around it all the time; it blocks a clear view of the installation with performers, blocks passage, and just eats up the space. The asteroid and the dot in the depth of the theatrical installation form a bond, an axis invisibly piercing the room. A sort of energy line.

The menace from outer space (or whatever it is that the black ball represents) is like a figure of omission that people do not openly discuss. But physically, it is very much present. Even photography-wise, one can’t put together the joyful theatre and the comet into the same frame, and the room does not offer a vantage point. People just move around, have another glass of wine, craning their necks to see their vis-à-vis around the non-reflective globe.

MishMash, The Future of the Past installation detail, 2025. Mixed Media. (Courtesy: MishMash).

When you perceive that the exhibition is about the imminent end of the world, and that we all try to forget about that looming perspective, clinging to the makeshift, overcomplicated decorations of our lives, you start to see the details. The fraud (or magic) of art is that it makes anything look worthwhile. The artists comment: “We made … these baroque vignettes out of all kinds of crap—bones, chewing gum, plaster bandages, cotton wool—but here’s the paradox: when you reproduce reality or ideas about reality in art, it inevitably shifts from the category of the hideous to the category of the beautiful.”

MishMash, The Future of the Past detail, 2025. Mixed Media. (Courtesy: MishMash).

Themselves, MishMash do a good job of avoiding categorisation. Hating to be pinned down to a place in the world or an artistic language, they have worked with almost any medium available, often combining those. On the one hand, chaos is good, as something new is always born out of it. On the other hand, structure, diaries, lists, and daily practices are good, as they allow one to preserve, analyse, and move forward step by step. The group is rooted in the Moscow romantic conceptualism, the underground art movement originating in the mid-1970s that has developed largely independently from the world’s art scene behind the Iron Curtain until the Perestroika. Since its inception, several generations of Russian-born artists have been influenced by it. In MishMash’s case, we also need to include daily pictures, postcards, and telegrams of On Kawara as well as endurance performances by Tehching Hsieh as possible influences. But upon that foundation, modern Western attitudes have given fruit. For example, the duo names Julius von Bismark as one of the favourite artists currently, who, like MishMash, is definitely media-spanning.

MishMash, The Future of the Past detail, 2025. Mixed Media. (Courtesy: MishMash).

The duo has also developed its own term ‘Hideoism’ for something born out of chaos: “Hideoism finds pleasure, delight and beauty in the casual, absurd and disgusting”, as they comment. One of the exhibitions built around the concept was Construction Set for David Hume (2021). It was shown within the exhibition Assuming Distance: Speculations, Fakes, and Predictions in the Age of the Coronacene (Garage Museum, Moscow) and consisted of 25 dadaist assemblages made of very unlikely materials. These were put under glass covers and mounted upon tree-like structures at face height. As if that were not enough, individual portraits of each sculpture were drawn and exhibited in one of the exhibition’s many halls. The whole installation was looking deliberately redundant and quite willing to be exposed from any possible angle, but no explanation stemmed from all its plentiful detail.

MishMash, Construction Set for David Hume, 2021. Mixed Media. Assuming Distance: Speculations, Fakes, and Predictions in the Age of the Coronacene, installation view, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, 2021. (Photo: Yuri Palmin).

That is where the group’s interest in baroque starts. They state: “In the Baroque, the essence lies in folds. Light and shadow – the opposition of black and white – are born in the folds of the same fabric.”

And that’s the end of the world as we know it, too.