Ulyana Podkorytova, Neha Lavingia. If one finds a feather

MYTH Gallery, with the support of collectors Ekaterina Terebenina and Andrey Terebenin, presents the exhibition «If one finds a feather», a collaborative project by two artists: Neha Lavingia, a resident of Threshold Art Gallery (India), and Ulyana Podkorytova, a resident of MYTH Gallery (Russia). This exhibition is a dialogue between the artists about the values that permeate their work. India serves as the unifying force that inspired the entire project. 

The artists from Russia and India—Ulyana Podkorytova and Neha Lavingia—merge their practices in a cross-cultural exploration of cyclical existence, memory, and ritual. Ulyana brings sculpture and graphics into the space, works filled with spiritual inquiry and ideas of collectivity, while Neha’s delicate watercolors invite viewers to pause and observe the details, witnessing how she transforms fleeting moments into precious memories. «If You Found a Feather» is not merely an aesthetic exchange or a recreation of a journey between countries—it immerses the audience in universal states, from tactile closeness to contemplative solitude. The exhibition acts as a bridge between cultures and a living reminder that one finds oneself only through connection with others.

“It took several months to take a few steps,
From autumn to spring,
Under the shade of a tree.
Leaf by leaf, telling stories of the recent past…”

Indian artist Neha Lavingia, with calligraphic delicacy, renders in her watercolours the foliage of trees and flower petals, fragile stems and brittle branches, as well as feathers of unknown birds. Her drawings are accompanied by poetic fragments: scraps of phrases often framed with ellipses, as if suggesting that the story may continue, and surely is continuing somewhere — “someone left part of their story behind, found it, picked it up, and carried it off to weave into a new one…” Every word is but a leaf, every phrase but a branch cast off by a vast, immeasurable tree, in whose trunk the voices of many tales are interwoven. The branches of these phrases stretch between past and future, and a fallen leaf still retains the memory of the spring in which it was born.

Neha Lavingia’s work is deeply rooted in a traditional culture shaped by the cyclical rhythm of the seasons — a world in which the great narrative binds people, identities, history, and truth into a living unity. It is around the fire of storytelling that society finds its centre, anchoring itself in being. Storytelling and listening are mutually sustaining acts: each listener may gather a fallen leaf of language and weave it into the garland of their own unfolding tale.

Already in the late 1970s, Jean-François Lyotard announced the collapse of the grand narratives: storytelling had lost its authority as a means of legitimising knowledge. In the 21^st century, cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han describes a continuing narrative crisis. Storytelling and information, he writes, are antithetical forces — information, when withheld, generates narrative tension; but the proliferation of information dissolves it. The informatization of society hastens its denarrativization. “Today’s tsunami of information sharpens the narrative crisis, plunging us into the madness of the topical. Information fragments time. Time is reduced to a meagre trace of the current. It has no temporal breadth or depth. […] We exist without history, for storytelling is history.”

Walter Benjamin begins his essay “Experience and Poverty” (1933) with a retelling of Aesop’s fable about an old man who, on his deathbed, told his sons he had hidden all he owned in his vineyard. The sons, naturally, thought of treasure, dug up the whole vineyard, and found nothing. But when the time came for harvest, the well-tilled soil yielded a crop of grapes richer than any in the region, delivering a lesson to the would-be treasure hunters: prosperity lies not in gold but in diligent labour. This fable was a commonplace in German schoolbooks. Benjamin asks: “Where has all this gone? Where can one find a man who can tell a decent story? Where are those who leave a legacy on their deathbed…?” Even a century ago, thinkers bore witness to the decline of the art of storytelling, since “wisdom — epic truth — is dying out” (Benjamin); and also to the devaluation of personal experience, once passed on to future generations like a family heirloom. The informational flood kept sweeping these values further away.

Now, contemporary Russian artist Ulyana Podkorytova has drawn creative inspiration from a family myth. Her mother kept a blue feather in a box carved from Karelian birch, claiming it belonged to a bird known as the red-backed shrike — and that such a feather was a harbinger of good fortune. Strangely, real shrikes have no blue plumage. “Perhaps it’s a most unusual shrike,” the artist mused, and set off in search of the “magic feather”… to India. In the Kullu Valley, she wandered along winding mountain paths between temples near the villages of Naggar and Manali, seeking the feather of the marvellous blue bird that had fluttered out of her mother’s tale. Might it have been this very bird that shed its feathers across Neha Lavingia’s watercolours?

Today, histories have yielded to stories, which now reign as the dominant mode of expression across social media platforms. But is this substitution truly equivalent? These fragmented sequences of ephemeral moments do not seek to transcend the contingency of the world; instead, they accept it as a given. Histories forge connections between people, stirring empathy and shared understanding, whereas stories tend to atomise and estrange the experiences of life—even for their own “tellers.” The vogue for storytelling only points to the absence left behind by the collapse of grand narratives — those once capable of shaping and transforming society.

According to legend, the Kullu Valley, or Valley of the Gods, is a place where all wishes come true. Nicholas Roerich believed that the soul of the world was concentrated there. Ulyana’s sojourn in the valley coincided with Dussehra, the great pan-Indian festival celebrating the triumph of good over evil, during which the gods themselves are said to descend. For seven days, devotional bhajans resound and sacred rituals unfold, culminating in the act of animal sacrifice that marks the festival’s close.

Rituals are narrative acts, for a ritual is the culmination of a story. The exhibition If One Find a Feather unfolds as a veiled narrative in its own right, drawing the viewer into a journey through Neha Lavingia’s lyrical forest, where deities await in the form of a new series of sculptures by Ulyana Podkorytova. Some emerge from the deep soil of Indian mythology; others exist solely within the artist’s private mythology. These figures are shaped from clay, one of humanity’s most ancient materials, singular in its capacity to bear the memory of its transformations. Warm, tactile, and imbued with presence, clay resists the cold detachment of modern substances like glass, concrete, metal, and plastic. It retains the hardened traces of the artist’s hands, as though safeguarding the memory of her journey, yet it remains supple, receptive to further metamorphosis through the gaze of the viewer, who brings to it their own hidden stories.

Will the feather be found? According to Walter Benjamin, the storyteller is one who is able “to give the listener advice”: not as a solution to a problem, but as a gesture toward how the story might continue.

Zlata Adashevskaya

Project partners:

Contemporary Art Gallery Threshold Art Gallery 

Online media ART FLASH Magazine

Media about contemporary art The Gathering

Hovard Art Foundation for Cultural Projects

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