Art on a Postcard International Women’s Day Auction - Curated by Alexandra Steinaker

About 

The wish to penetrate the past, to rebel against the irreversibility of time - this is what fuels my practice. I use vintage photographs as a means of launching my painting. They allow me to have a window into the past, but this window is cut by the person behind the lens, so it is biased and selective. Photographs tease us with a glanced moment but they do not allow the moment to be entered into. So as a time machine, the photograph is rather flawed. 

Why do I have this desire to enter the past in the first place? Being born in the USSR just prior to its collapse, I spent my childhood in the ruins of its cultural paradigm. The oral narratives passed down to me by family recounting the Soviet era were rather contradictory, my school history textbooks were being altered and re-written in front of my eyes, so my generation learned early that history cannot be trusted. They say to know the future one must know the past - but what happens if you have no past, what happens when you’re born at the point of a fissure, a crack, a departure? 

In my practice I alter, abstract, and fictionalize transferred photographic images, either of my family or found in flea markets, leaving an imprint of my own bodily movement in them through my gestured marks - and this movement driven by the desire to reclaim the past. By translating the sign of “oldness” into a painted image I can control the visual dynamics of the photographic image, start to impose my own subjective position, organize a formal space and think through painting. The large formats of my canvases allow me to feel them not as a window, but rather as a portal to the past, through which I can insert my presence. I seek to disrupt the linear spatial perspective of the photograph, so I deliberately destroy the relationship between the foreground and background, mixing them into a single pictorial mass of slimy paint. 

Therefore, my painting is a way to enter into some sensual interaction with the reality from the past, captured in images, driven by my protest against the subjectivity of history. 

Education 

2018 - 2021 Royal College of Arts, MA Painting 
2015 - 2017 ICA Moscow, "New Methods in Contemporary art" Certificate program in fine art ICA Moscow 
2014 - 2015 Paris College Of Art, Certificate program in fine art 
2012 - 2013 Kingston University London, MA Art and Space 
2005 - 2011 St Petersburg State University, Department of Psychology, Specialist degree in Social Psychology 

Select Exhibitions/Awards 

Personal and two-artists projects 
2023 The Bath Open Art Prize Exhibition, 44AD artspace, Сentral Bath, UK 
2023 Voices from a suitcase, Shtager&Shch Gallery, London UK 
2022 When my babushka joined the Reich, ArtWorks Project Space, Barbican Arts Group Trust, UK 
2022 Fractures of the lens(with Simon Hodgkinson), Burgh House, London, UK 
2022 Picnic in July, 1937, Open Studios, Winzavod CCA, Moscow, RU 
2021 Act 1. Scene 5. Room in the Castle (with Anna Tagantzeva-Kobzeva), Smirnov Sorokin Fund, Moscow, RU 
2020 Atelier by the Police bridge, Duckley Project Gallery, Budva, ME 
2018 Voyariste’s attic, FFTN Gallery, St Petersburg, RU 
2016 Oilcloth, Gallery Art-League, Pushkinskaya 10 Museum, St Petersburg, RU 
2016 Communal paradise lost, Gallery Beo-Project', Belgrade, RS 
2016 Advantages of spiders (with Pyotr Shvetsov) Gallery Luda, St Petersburg, RU 
2016 Something is getting out, Gallery «Intimnoe mesto», St Petersburg, RU 

EXHIBITIONS CURATED 
2019 Nostalgia 2.0 The zombie stage, RED DOOR Project Space, London, UK 
2017 Then it was unknown to us, Moscow International biennale for young art, parallel program, Poligraphicheskii tzeh, Moscow, RU 

GROUP EXHIBITIONS 
2023 Shades of Red, Fox Yard Studio, Stowmarket, UK 
2023 Holt Festival, Holt, UK 
2022 Power to emotions, Tart Gallery, London, UK 
2022 Little explosions, The Bomb Factory South, London, UK 
2022 Overwhelming majority, Schtager Gallery, London, UK 
2022 Demolution, K.L.8, Brussels, BE 
2022 A room of her own, Irving Contemporary, Oxford, UK 
2021 Marvels of reason, Ural Vision Gallery, Yekaterinburg, RU 
2021 ArtWorks Open 2021, Barbikan Arts Group Trust, London, UK 

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