I’ll stop being an artist if it starts snowing indoors

In this performance, Nevelin Ivanov brings one stage of his institutional formation to a close by dismantling the very symbols of his academic training. Just days after formally graduating from the National Academy of Art, he invites the audience to participate in the destruction of hundreds of drawings produced over the course of his four-year education — works accumulated not as autonomous pieces, but as tools within an educational system. These drawings, once concealed behind torn plastic in You Will Not See This Exhibition, now reappear, only to be cut into pieces, one by one, by the viewers themselves.

What unfolds is a collective act of disintegration. Ivanov orchestrates a scene in which the audience becomes complicit in a symbolic and material erasure. In doing so, he questions the established roles of viewer and author, as well as the passivity often attributed to the act of looking. As the cut drawings descend from the upper floors of the Water Tower, resembling a snowfall, the performance creates a fragile and fleeting spectacle — at once innocent, conclusive, and quietly violent.

Through this poetic yet unsettling gesture, Ivanov opens up a critical space for reflecting on the nature of value in art. The performance confronts the commodification of artistic production by foregrounding its surplus: hundreds of drawings that hold little to no value on the contemporary art market, yet remain central to the structure of artistic education. What happens when these works are no longer regarded as preparatory exercises, but as material for destruction? Can their very destruction become the artistic act?

The act of cutting reverses the logic of accumulation characteristic of both the art market and the academic system. Rather than producing more, Ivanov erases. Far from being an act of defeat, this negation becomes a constructive gesture — an assertion of agency over an artistic identity shaped, and perhaps stifled, by institutional standards. In this sense, the performance is both a personal catharsis and a form of institutional critique, resonating with the idea of failure as a form of resistance.

The snow-like rain of paper further complicates questions of visibility. In his earlier work, Ivanov denied direct access to the art object. Here, the drawings are finally revealed — but only in the moment of their disintegration. Their presence is fleeting; their visibility, conditional. Through this paradox, the artist reasserts the value of the ephemeral, the invisible, and the anti-object.

I Will Stop Being an Artist If It Starts Snowing Indoors is more than a performance. It is a test of boundaries: between visibility and disappearance, authorship and participation, learning and unlearning. It is an act of beautiful sabotage — art destroyed in order to become something entirely different.