The Rule of Two Walls (2025)

Artist book

Poetry: Egana Jabbarova

Inkjet printing on handmade paper, monotype on parachute

Size:  45 × 38 × 7 cm

Commissioned by Garage Museum

Garage Museum collection

The pop-up book “The Rule of Two Walls” is based on the real notebook of Bogomolova’s father, a navigator of military transport aviation. Its pages contain notes on combat exercises and preparations for a nuclear strike (dated from the late 1980s, the period of the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan) alongside children’s drawings by the artist that capture the image of a desired home.

The title of the work refers to a well-known civil defense rule: in the case of shelling, one should take shelter in the inner part of a room, away from windows. The structure of the artist book follows this logic, opening with a hallway-shelter. The children’s drawings of rooms in the project are transformed into ideal interiors with three-dimensional details; however, fragments of the father’s notes invade the elements of the decor.

The external “walls” of the book, which in opened format resembles the dome of a cargo parachute, are covered by Egana Jabbarova' texts. Written in the form of peculiar counting rhymes, they establish an order for viewing the work, creating a contrasting reading: the bedroom in the shelter-house becomes a zone of defeat, the bathroom — a way to hide from WMDs, and the pantry — a storage for emergency rations. The synergy of visual narratibe and poetry captures the coexistence of a private dream of escape and safety with the broader context of anxiety.