Yury Aleksanyan

Tiebreaker — Project Abstract

Installation

427cm x 370cm x 242cm

Found objects, goauche, wire, metalwork, ink, watercolour and sound.

Edinburgh College of Art Graduate Show 2026

This project began as an attempt to bring together a sequence of remarkable academic texts documenting human encounters with the Slavic forest spirit – the leshy. The project’s aim was to translate the extensive philological research achieved by scholars operating throughout Europe into the art studio, thus condensing the vast quantities of data and crafting a personal commentary on its inconsistencies, its uniqueness and its brilliance. This idea, paired with a familial connection to Russian paganism, took root through the manipulation and reanimation of discarded objects, morphing and transforming them into the material parts of the shapeshifting forest spirit. This culminated in the creation of three individual sculptures – three unique leshy. 

Discussions surrounding the leshy’s inanimate sentience emerged directly from audience responses to exhibition tests. The inclusion of the card game Дурак (Durak/Fool) animated the figures in a manner that invited interaction, prompting us to question the extent of their vitality — the emotions they might possess, and even which of the three leshy was winning at Дурак. In this way, the installation evolved into a playful yet conceptually charged encounter, balancing communal entertainment with mythos. 

The project concluded with the creation of suspended animation. By constructing a scene in which the three leshy are captured mid-action and embedded within a framework of ancient history, the work questions the nature of sculpture itself, dissolving the margins between mediums. It operates simultaneously as a document of a distinct sphere of contemporary folkloric research and an exploration of the fluid boundaries between the sculptural and the ephemeral, the animate and the inanimate, and the seen and the unseen worlds through which the spirits diffuse.