Dmitry Lookianov’s Instant Tomorrow captures a futurist Moscow where perfection masks emptiness, and gadget-laden interiors whisper of loneliness beneath sterile surfaces.
His vision of a futuristic Moscow is neither sci-fi spectacle nor dystopian nightmare—it’s a measured, sterile purgatory where desire is pacified by gadgetry and the illusion of wellness. The snow-covered exteriors of high-rise buildings shimmer with promise, but the moment Lookianov steps inside, we find a different narrative: one of existential stillness, medical whiteness, and people caught in the architecture of their own consumption.
Lookianov’s interiors read like scenes from an IKEA catalogue—clean, efficient, neutral—but underneath, there’s a simmering anxiety. The clinical surfaces, the endless repetition of objects and bodies, the obsessive smoothness of skin and space—all of it converges into a near-parodic simulacrum of modern life. It's not beauty, but the pursuit of an optimized, frictionless existence, drained of spontaneity or spiritual texture.
His residents of this imagined Moscow aren't exactly suffering. They’re suspended—somewhere between passive acceptance and quiet despair. These aren’t the grotesque victims of failed ideology, but rather its docile benefactors. Their belief in gadgets is religious, their gestures ritualistic. Chinese face massagers and magnet masks replace fairy tale talismans. Every object hums with the promise of a better self, yet the images are airless, the performances flat.
The artist’s Rodchenko training is visible in the technical clarity, but it's the conceptual layering that gives Instant Tomorrow its critical weight. Lookianov engages not just with Russian suburbia but with global aesthetics of flattening—of homes that could be in Seoul, Berlin, or Dubai. In this world, personal identity recedes into algorithmic design: taste outsourced to catalogues, meaning replaced by brand fidelity, wellness dictated by marketing.
Philosophically, the work tilts toward Baudrillard. The things in Instant Tomorrow are not things—they're echoes of ideal forms, as if the Eidos of youth, beauty, and peace have been Photoshopped into being. Lookianov’s irony isn’t satirical, but melancholic. He constructs this sterile dream with such sincerity that the critique only fully emerges in the haunting aftertaste. The viewer is left with a quiet ache, a sense of having seen too much surface and not enough soul.
At the heart of this project lies a profound ambivalence. Lookianov is both documentarian and conjurer, seduced by the image even as he undermines it. His distance from his subjects is palpable, yet ultimately, he too is implicated. In photographing this hollow perfection, he risks being absorbed by it. And perhaps that’s the final tragedy of Instant Tomorrow: not that the future is empty, but that we’ve already begun to accept it.
