Evgeniya Martirosyan: 3+5Mermaids Arts Centre, Bray, Co Wicklow★★★☆☆Conflict and oppression do strange things to language. Dissimulations tend to proliferate as the channels of officialdom turn wars into “special military operations”, incursions inexplicably become excursions and torture morphs into enhanced interrogation.Likewise for people living under these conditions, while the general rule is often “whatever you say, say nothing”, as Seamus Heaney once put it, that particular saying of nothing can mask and contain multitudes.The title of Evgeniya Martirosyan’s current show at Mermaid, 3+5, refers to a coded term for “net voyne”, or “no to war” – based on the number of letters in each word – that Russian anti-war activists used after their country’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. As Vladimir Putin’s government works to rewrite schoolbooks along officially sanctioned lines, so too do resistances play out at the level of communication through the mechanisms of cipher, symbol and metaphor.Martirosyan, a Cork-based artist originally from Russia, presents five installation works that explore this contested nature of knowledge and appearances under conditions of conflict. In Zazara (2023), an expansive wall-mounted map of Russian territory is constructed from hundreds of razor blades. In Unravelling (2026), streams of news reports are printed on heat-sensitive paper, the clarity of which deteriorates over time, and which cascade down the gallery wall to pool on the floor below.3+5: Unravelling (2026), by Evgeniya Martirosyan. Photograph: Michael Durand 3+5: part of War Is Peace (2024), by Evgeniya Martirosyan. Photograph: Michael Durand War Is Peace (2024), an installation of clustered photographs created in collaboration with an anonymous photographer, presents a tableau of imagery from everyday Russian life. Young men in uniform abound, juxtaposed with images of apartment blocks, homes and streets where propaganda and military paraphernalia proliferate. Here and there images repeat themselves, as if to emphasise the monotony and incessant nature of totalitarian rule.In We Will We Will Rock You (2026), 19 school shirts hung on stands of steel and concrete are presented in precise formation. Video projected on to the clothes shows covertly shot footage of Russian teenagers engaged in mandatory military drills and exercises.3+5: We Will We Will Rock You (2026), by Evgeniya Martirosyan. Photograph: Michael Durand 3+5: Evgeniya Martirosyan’s titular installation (2024). Photograph: Michael Durand At the centre of the exhibition is the titular installation: 12 steel-and-wood school tables and benches are arranged in two neat rows. The desks are strewn with piles of books and magazines, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and copies of National Geographic among them. They face what looks like a blackboard without any discernible content. Instead all you can see is what seem like rusty, corroded imprints of pages on a steel screen.In fact all of the works across the whole show are unified and drawn together by the presence of rust – on the razor blades, on the paper, on the clothing and on the photographs, through chemical processes undertaken by the artist. It’s admittedly a powerful metaphor, pointing as it variously does to corruption, decay and the futility of human efforts to dominate nature. But, like all powerful metaphors, its force can be overwhelming. As with Anselm Kiefer, another artist with a proclivity for drawing on the aesthetics of rust, the appeal to its symbolic resonance can quite easily appear ponderous and heavy-handed. Martirosyan neither escapes nor falls into this trap entirely, but it does result in a certain air of monotony pervading the show. Despite this, as individual pieces, all the works in 3+5 are well realised, and the show as a whole is undoubtedly, if depressingly, relevant.Evgeniya Martirosyan: 3+5 is at Mermaid Arts Centre until Saturday, July 18th