Game Without Pawns
Sergey Rozhin
Performance and Solo Exhibition
07.04 – 21.04.2022
The performance will be repeated with the participation of the artist and the audience during the exhibition from 5 PM to 6 PM.
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The black and white cells are like Malevich’s squares—the black and white represent the poetry of the game between good and evil.
The game of chess itself only makes sense when there are pawns in it. If we remove them, the balance of the game is disrupted.
Placed in this context, we can see the helplessness and vulnerability of the main pieces—without pawns, they lose their value. And if we think of the pawns that go from the beginning to the end of the game, turning into other pieces, then even they are now helpless, because they will no longer be able to become pawns.
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The story behind the creation of the work “Without Pawns”
For the performance in this game, I needed a special chess set, which I found in an antique shop in the city of Plovdiv.
I wanted to find a chess set that had a history, because a new set would not be as interesting to hold, nor as symbolic. For this reason, I went through many antique shops that had either only individual pieces or only the board. After losing all hope of finding what I wanted, I asked again if they had chessboards, to which they said: “We do, but I’ll have to search for a long time.” I said I was “ready to wait.” After being warned in advance that there were no pieces with the board, I replied that the board alone would suit me.
And then, when they found the board and opened it, it turned out that there were chess pieces inside, which the seller himself did not know about.
So, I bought the chessboard along with the pieces, and before I left, the seller said that it had “lived” there for 7 years and no one had bought it.
When I saw this chessboard, as they took it out, I felt that it had been waiting specifically for me.
During the conversation with the seller, I told him about my plan to play without pawns, and he gave me his advice: “Try playing without the King; then this game will definitely make no sense, considering its rules.”
Then he said that this chessboard had appeared in the film “A Nameless Band” in 1982. I was delighted by this moment and couldn’t wait to tell people about its origin, but it turned out that the film features a similar, but not the same, board. If only you knew how happy I was at that moment, until I checked it.
In this “Game Without Pawns,” I decided to focus on the number seven, as its presence here is not accidental.
