Penrose stairs
Moscow, Russia, 2021
2021, I lived in Moscow, Russia. I couldn’t shake the feeling that something terrible and creepy was happening around me. However, I had no way to fully see it. Occasionally, it would become momentarily visible, appearing in my smartphone’s photo album as odd, inexplicable images. To reconcile these two realities—the visible normality and the invisible eeriness—I decided to turn my apartment building public stairs into a gallery of images. Climbing a broken stair was my usual nightmare in my childhood. Using an augmented reality app, I placed weird pictures across all 14 floors of the public stairs. I then recorded a video of myself going from the first to the fourteenth floor, encountering these puzzling images along the way. They blended surprisingly well with the walls, staircases, and garbage chute of the building.
It’s now 2024. I’ve been living outside of Russia for over two years and haven’t set foot in that building since I left. Honestly, I don’t know if I’ll ever return. Looking back from today, I feel like I was anticipating the rupture in my life—the divide between before and after the Russian army’s invasion of Ukraine. After the invasion, the grim side of reality revealed itself, and life in that apartment block became impossible.
The Penrose stairs (also known as the impossible staircase) is an optical illusion depicting a staircase that appears to ascend or descend endlessly in a loop. It creates the paradox of a continuous, unachievable ascent (or descent), where one seems to return to the starting point without ever going up or down. It was invented by mathematician Roger Penrose and his father, Lionel Penrose, in the 1950s and later became widely known through the work of Dutch artist M.C. Escher, particularly in his artwork "Ascending and Descending" (1960). Escher’s art explores similar impossible structures, where perspective tricks the eye into believing something physically impossibl
