A year-long project by Moscow artist Masha Sumnina will result in 365 sculptures – all contained within each other.

Moscow artist Masha Sumnina (b. 1977), well-known as one half of the artist duo MishMash, which she created together with her husband Mikhail Leikin (b. 1968) in 2001, has launched a new solo project called ‘Over & Over’. On January 1 this year, she announced that she would wrap the ‘Number 1’ cut from plywood in a new layer of self-made packaging every day. Two months have already passed, and the artist is keeping her promise. Each layer is made out of a different material, from knitted wool to supermarket receipts, and the sculpture is getting bigger each day like an absurd fruit. You can see its progress on Sumnina’s Facebook page, where she posts daily photo updates on her project. The multi-layered work (in a very literal sense) immediately brings to mind both Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s wraps and traditional Russian matryoshka nesting dolls. On a closer look, it makes you reflect on the material and philosophical dimensions of time, the gap between documentation and reality, the fleeting nature of art and memory and even the very idea of progress. “It is just happening every day and when the year is over, it’s over,” the artist explains. Is this not the perfect way to sum up human existence in general?