Iliko Zautashvili’s installation Minutes Before the Collapse is a critical reflection on the system within which he once lived. Two red gas containers of Soviet make placed in a black hand-cart filled up with coal, several mechanical metronomes making repetitive, evenly clicking sounds, and a small analog TV screen displaying black and white noise. The work is an allusion to the circumstances behind the Soviet space programs. Slave labor, the forced “sameness” imposed over society and non-stop propaganda were behind many significant achievements of the Soviet cosmos-related military. However, no matter how advanced the space programs were, a hand-cart requiring one’s body sweat in order to move was the object best describing the true nature of the Soviet Union. As one of the local jokes of the Cold War period goes, at one time the West was alarmed by new Soviet missiles being placed in a portable suitcase launcher, before they found out that the Soviets could not produce suitcases to begin with.