By Maria Bregman
London, April 2026. There is an intriguingly stubborn quality in the loopiness of a wooden strip of sculpture. The strip doubles on itself. It folds. It loops back to its origin again and again. It comes back to where it started. Walking through the reconstructed Prokofiev studio – a reconstruction of his studio on Dace Road in Hackney Wick, London, from the 1990s – you begin to understand that the sculptural logic of the work and the overall logic of the show are exactly the same.
Bending Time opens at Prokofiev Studio, 13 Ramsgate Street, London E8 2FD, on Thursday 30 April from 6 to 9 pm, and runs through to 29 May 2026. The gallery opens Monday to Wednesday and Friday from 2 to 6 pm, Thursdays until 8 pm, and at weekends from 11 am. The admission is free, which should be noted.
What the curators have managed to do, however, goes beyond the standard. Rather than turning the archive into a mausoleum, they have made of it a functional machine still in operation. And the whole thing was actually put together by Anzhela Popova, who curated the exhibition, basically.
Oleg Prokofiev (1928-1998), whose father Sergei Prokofiev was among the greatest composers of the twentieth century, had to live most of his adult life in the contradictory reality of being both a dissident, a sculptor and the son of Sergei Prokofiev. He defected from the Soviet Union and returned to Britain via New York, where he learned something essential about treating space as matter, rather than an enclosing entity, and found himself a language in sculpture that belonged entirely to him. “Line in Space,” Prokofiev’s concept, means exactly what it says. Wooden slats, thick and heavy, twist into knots, unravel into chains and garlands and serpentine forms that stretch across a room in the manner of lengthy and ponderous sentences.
Eduardo Chillida labelled similar objects as “space-modulations.” It’s an accurate term, although perhaps somewhat euphemistic. Prokofiev’s artworks are less accommodating and more aggressive than this title implies. Not only do they exert influence on their immediate environment; they reshape the entire room according to their own logic. Within the recreated studio – amidst the sketchbooks, manuscripts, photos and bits of ephemera that formed the original context for creative process – their resonance changes at a different frequency entirely.
You are no longer looking at final products put on display for aesthetic enjoyment. Instead, you are within the context of how these works were created. This makes for a very different kind of experience altogether.
The central gallery expands on the parameters in question via the inclusion of a further two artists, namely Valentino Vannini and Kirill Basalaev. Neither artist pays mere lip service to the tradition of Prokofiev; it would be too boring if they did. Rather, each of them engages with the heritage in question through pressures that are uniquely theirs.
Valentino Vannini. Did you leave it behind for me to find_ #4 2025 Kiln-formed glass, mild steel, high density foam, wax – Dimensions 100 x 56 x 103 cm
Valentino Vannini is an artist born in Italy but living in London. He graduated from City & Guilds of London Art School, holding an MA as well as the Artist Glass and Casting Fellowship at the institution. His work revolves around materiality as argument – concretes and vaselines, industrial meshes and natural fibres, cylindrical objects that partially reveal what lies inside of them. Permeability seems to be his thing. The way the boundary between two spaces ceases being a mere barrier to become a point of interest instead. The sculptural works that he creates in the brutalist style impose themselves into the surroundings through their quiet confrontation.
Though absent from the architecture, the presence is overwhelming. It’s an entirely different language, compared to that of Prokofiev, however, the grammar behind it – form as a way of negotiating and space not to be inhabited but created – remains consistent.
Kirill Basalaev. Alimentation, 2025, canvas, filler, cement, acrylic, spray, 150 x 120 cm.
The approach of Basalaev is distinct yet again. The contemporary Russian artist who lives and works in London engages with both abstract painting, sculpture, and video art. His practice is inherently urban: cities, in all of their cracks and scars, do not serve only as the material of his creative work. They are the tool through which Basalaev approaches his practice: he does not just replicate the texture of the city wall, instead, transforming it into an element of the creative act. This intrinsic connection between memory and place in his practice adds a whole new level to his participation in the project Bending Time. While for Prokofiev, the archive reconstructs the environment of the private studio, Vannini investigates the fragility of material surfaces, Basalaev makes the city itself his archive, wounded and layered, never complete. His last solo exhibition, titled Inside Out at Metamorphika Studios, recently concluded.
The connection between three artists, three different techniques and three different approaches to art is obvious. However, the exhibition has a coherent logic, which was achieved not through forced unification of disparate elements, but through the presence of one common feature.
The first thing that distinguishes these three artists from others is their approach to time and its perception. Time in the artworks of Prokofiev does not flow in a single direction and constantly goes backward. Fibres used in Vannini’s sculptures become an inseparable part of the mesh and thus remain connected to the past forever. Basalaev’s urban surfaces preserve the history of each element of the city and allow the artist to create a unique artwork that reflects its history. In all cases, the past is not stored somewhere; it becomes an integral part of the present and helps the artist perform the tasks he or she wants.
The reconstruction of Prokofiev Studio can be viewed as another step in this direction because it allows the viewer to understand how Prokofiev lived and worked.ments and materials are presented as pieces of evidence in
Three artists. Three distinct practices. And yet the exhibition holds together with a logic that feels earned rather than curated into existence by force.
However, there will always be the danger that the restored studio turns into nothing but a theatrical staging of history – in effect equating rearranging furniture with access to the mind of an artist. Prokofiev Studio skillfully avoids falling into that trap. Here, the documents, sketch books, and photos are not being offered as evidence in a trial by court historians. On the contrary, they actively participate in the exhibition process. Meaning leaks through the gaps in the documents rather than being sealed in its entirety.
In truth, it is only here that one gets a glimpse of what Bending Time is all about. It is neither about preserving the past, nor honoring any particular legacy. The truth is that an archive is more than just a storehouse of the past; it is a generative mechanism.
Hackney Wick has gradually developed over the last twenty years into one of those areas in London where there is a productive tension between the industrial history of the city and contemporary art practice. Dace Road, where Prokofiev started out, is only a fifteen-minute walk from his current studio in Ramsgate Street. This is no coincidence. This project is grounded in the particular archaeology of Hackney Wick, which has been evolving and reinventing itself for decades within the pressures of that part of London.
Visit on 30 April, if possible. Visit in the early days of May. The type of thought process that is taking place within that studio is worthy of some proper time.
