Lyolya Yefremova is a fictional character created by Dana kavelina. According to the myth, she was an artist that lived in Kiev and committed suicide, leaving a lot of painting, video and texts in her room, including a goodbye film and a play that according to her will should have been read on her funeral.
Lyolya Yefremova project contain of two parts - the funeral feast and the room.
Essay written about the exhibition by Alex Fisher:
http://guestrooms.xyz/the-room-of-lyolya-yefremova/
The total installation reproduces the living space of an artist who lived in poverty and probably suffered from a mental disorder. According to the myth, after the artist committed suicide her friends opened the room to the public to make her history and art visible.
In the room, in addition to household items, there were her books, drawings, paintings, a diary, and a computer on which her farewell film, play, photographs, and last letters to relatives were recorded. The whole assemblage of objects in the room is a kind of text, that consists from fragments and hints, that could help to reconstruct the lifestory or gather an image of a person that left: an image that inevitably dissolves. An important element of the large non-linear narrative of the installation is the story of the character's disease and what’s even more important – the connection of her political views with her life practices and, as a result, with the radical gesture of recognizing her defeat as an artist and political subject, that is, the decision to die.
According to the rules of the exhibition, only one person could visit it at a time. The visit time was unlimited. Left alone with the room and its contents, the viewer found himself enclosed in a very intimate space and could find his own unique juxtaposition of himself and the space and its narrative, build a distance to it or rather sink into its deep intimacy, become a researcher, a witness, a confessor, a doctor or a friend, and create his own unique pattern of experiencing time spent in the room.