According to UN statistics, 3.5 percent of the planet's inhabitants – about 281 million people – are international migrants, that is, they no longer live in the country where they were born. 35 million of them are refugees, people who have moved due to force majeure circumstances, and not for personal reasons or career prospects. Thus, Plusch's project has a potentially huge audience. On a more serious note: "Witness to a Stranger's Life" is permeated with the familiar sense of anxiety and vulnerability that has characterised Plusch's works over the past decade.

Except that now there is more attention to detail, and the focus has shifted: now it is on the intricacies of domestic life in a very general sense – both sentimental and mundane. The home as a space and concept is going through hard times, so to speak, although, in the new series called "Solaris", Plusch has softened those tenacious references to "everything else" with pastel backgrounds warm in hue. However, if you peer deeply into the soothing haze, you see skeletons of walls, charred plaster and other facts from the news feeds. Apartments and summer houses are spread out on operating tables. Their outlines resemble a 3D graphics render that has not uploaded fully, as if the architect impatiently decided to submit the project long before it was ready. In one painting, black slime spills out of a 3D scan of a typical provincial Khrushchev-era block of flats, with part of a yard, a playground, garages and workers' huts. In another, a private house with a swimming pool is being eaten away by heavy malachite-green mould, a metaphor for derealization and disaster. Growing both here and there, as evidence of post-traumatic amnesia, are blurred patches in the shape of trees, flowerpots and other landscape details.

Plusch likes bringing together, within one exhibition, projects from different years, and "Witness to a Stranger's Life" is no exception. Besides "Solaris", uninhabited just like the homonymous planet, he presents the series "Tear Shadows" (2023), in which the former inhabitants of "Solaris", who abandoned their houses and flats are depicted in motion, or rather, in transition from the world of the living to the category of fading memories. Placed in the centre of the exposition is an installation – "Apotheosis of Childhood", of particular importance to Plusch, – a structure made of balls in the shape of the mountain of skulls from Vasily Vereshchagin's famous painting. This shift in emphasis from the symbolism of death to the image of loss and absence, which has been overly saturated with decades of cinematographic imagery, is understandable in an era when it is namely the loss of children's lives that is at the heart of ethical debates about military action. Is that too direct? Indeed, rather more than is usual for Ivan Plusch. However, there is no time for formalities when one can see little difference between being witnesses to a stranger's life and witnesses to a stranger's death.