Manifesto

The state of being an artist can justifiably be called a profession, but relatively close to me is also the notion of identity, perhaps because it causes difficulties. While working also as a designer, I almost immediately began to realize that I could not allow myself to behave as an artist in relation to business matters of the applied field. More often than not, I cannot allow myself to be an artist any longer at all.

Like many others who overcame the pressure of media narrowness of the post-Soviet academic education, I aimed to experience the widest possible range of art practices. Graphics, painting, sculpture, sound, photography, video, performance, samizdat, artistic research, curatorial practices, and activism — I am still equipped with almost all of these mediums. Training in graphics adjusted my thinking in the optics of reduction, so probably therefore the conceptual approaches are very important for me. My relationship with theory, especially feminist theory, is not very flat. This field encourages me as an artist to start arguments and intervention gestures. Since 2016 in the context of Welcome To The Doll House! games I introduced the notion of Prichuzhdenie (the exact translation of the term into English is still not developed, if you have any ideas I will be glad to hear it!) as an antonym for Otchuzdenie (Marx's term Alienation). In 2019, I created a ceramic work dedicated to the 100 years anniversary of the Freudian term Unheimlichkeit (Uncanny) which attached Gemütliche (Cozy) to it. In 2020 I began to develop provisions for Feminist artistic research as a discipline. In 2021, I wished to establish Silence féminine as a responsive practice for visual feminist artists onto the French concept of the 70s Écriture féminine.

Probably the biggest effort of my creative pathway is dedicated to collaboration practice. For about 10 years now, I have been engaged with mainly group and infrastructure projects. I still consider it extremely important, however, I also feel the invigorating challenge of the responsibility of the individual expression as well as the interest in non-targeted artistic designs. There, I am mostly interested in the issue of the establishment of individual practice. What can / should my life as an artist consist of? As it becomes apparent with the physical maturation, not least out of self-case — it should consist of the responsibility for the flow of physical, chemical, emotional reactions in the body, but also of concern for the morpho-logics of your thinking — sensitive study of your own ethical, plastic and other benefits. I am surprised that only now I started to feel the interconnection between the structure of everyday life and artistic practice, the tension from the responsibility to shape the both. The figure of an artist is her bravest private way of space and time arrangement, a defiant challenge to the normality of things, but also an issue of self-discipline in its most fundamental sense. It is fascinatingly interesting how it can be arranged by other, close and distant women. For example, Virginia Woolf’s formula was working with two takes a day: to write two texts at the same time, before lunch and after tea, combining the critical writing with the artistic one. I also like to perform parallel plastic tasks, in such a situation one can productively admire the differentiation of qualities.

The status of women and artists as a topic in the local professional sphere worries me and keeps me constantly tensed. The habits of the mind and psyche which I, my friends and enemies, would need to uncover, crack and tame. Role models that we need to become to ourselves, inventing and acting out on the latest politics, which is so much such and of high importance! As the oppression does not soften, yet it becomes more crafty and dubious. We are so closely intertwined with the male subjects in a way that we are sometimes so helplessly immobilized by these laces. I think the potential still lies in the self-study of female artists as a group. In conversation. In ability to untangle wings and teeth for further action and pleasure. What are we so poor about, and what are we so sad? Secondariness, poverty, trash of the post-Soviet land: here are the wrappers of the American feminism of the 70s, there are the French effervescent powders… seduction potion. However, this is also such a political pressure, probably the truest feminist delicacy are the ones that are self-invented! Every new place, every new hour.