Fyodor is no stranger to subversive, thought-provoking work having courted the spotlight with his guerrilla performances, including one in which he was wrapped in a carpet and suspended from a building on Dover Street in London in defence of the LGBTQ+ community in Chechnya. Most famously, he was dropped naked, wedged inside a clear plastic box, in front of New York’s Met Gala to draw attention to the diminished importance of performance art in the art world – a stunt that landed him in jail after firefighters had to cut him out.

Unlike all of his previous work where his body took centre stage, in ANTIFURNITURE, the artist’s own physicality is now replaced by that of the museum’s visitors who temporarily inhabit the sculptures by sitting, climbing, dangling, rocking or lying on them. The culmination of a three-year project evolution, each sculpture represents one or more phobias, which visitors are forced to face through physical discomfort and purposeful endurance. At the same time, the discomfort speaks to the social and psychological problems of modern society.

The “Trophy-Hammock”, an inverted hammock where instead of lying on your back, you lie on your front with your head, arms and legs dangling through the holes, explores the fear of heights and the fear of falling as a metaphor for the feelings evoked by current geopolitical crises. “Procrustes”, which takes its name from the Greek myth of Procrustes, a robber who claimed the lives of the wayward travellers who didn’t perfectly fit in his iron bed by cutting off protruding parts, forces visitors into a brace position in reflection of living in a time of global catastrophes. It’s not all gloom and doom though; “Push-Me-Pull-You”, a type of seesaw where you sit with your back to one another, tests your ability to engage with someone without looking at them, and by extension warns of the dangers of miscommunication in geopolitics, while “Centipede”, where three people sit on top of each other, speaks of the necessity to trust people you don’t know as a way of overcoming our fears by working together. In the end, however uncomfortable the experience that ANTIFURNITURE offers, ultimately there’s always some lesson to be learnt and just as importantly, some fun to be had.