The object is made from mezzanine cabinet doors that our family brought to Russia after emigrating from Kyrgyzstan. I guess my parents were hoping to restore a fragment of our old everyday life. However, the doors remained unused for nearly 20 years.

Reflecting on a new place and a new time – now intertwined with a sense of anxiety and threat – I often returned to memories of a “childhood with open doors.” While sorting through belongings and coming across the forgotten mezzanine doors, I noticed that one of them bore the number 93. This was most likely a serial number, but it also coincided with the symbolic threshold of 1993, when that “childhood with open doors” came to an end and an entirely different era began.

The symbolic presence of this number-date on the door from that very childhood captivated me and led to the creation of this work.

When I was a child, Matveich lived in the apartment across from ours. Matveich was paralysed so he never got up. I saw him only through a half-open door — a massive body covered with blanket on an observation bed. Matveich had a visiting nurse but my grandmother used to care for him more often. She fed him and cleaned him up. The doors to our apartments never locked up. No one locked up doors back then. Matveich even had his door half-open so he could call “Ge-lya!” and my grandmother would come to him.

Matveich often verbally hurt my grandmother, she cried and promised in the heat of the moment that she would never come to him again but she did because the whole thing was harder for him than for her. One day a new doctor came to Matveich. He was looking like Vlad Listyev a popular journalist of that time and had a young good-looking assistant nurse. My grandmother was asked not to come anymore. Soon after Matveich died. Of course, there were rumours that this new doctor hired by the relatives “helped” him to die. Nowadays after I lock up, bar up and leave the key in the keyhole of the front door, I lie in my bed and think about Matveich.