At the fair, you will be able to get acquainted with the art of one of the coldest regions of Russia. In total, the works of six artists will be presented at the stand: Dunya Zakharova, Ksenia Kudrina, Anya Enot, Selena Shestakova, Nadezhda Komissarova and Ien Sur. The curator of the stand is the director of HSE ART GALLERY Yulia Yusma.
The authors were selected through an open call of the AyarKut Foundation for the Support of Contemporary Art in Yakutia, headed by Nadezhda Zinovskaya. The main mission of the foundation is to support and develop the culture of Yakutia in the region itself, as well as its presentation throughout Russia and abroad.
"The young art of Yakutia is surprisingly original: working on the territory of modern visual narratives, it explores its own specifics and historical foundations with deep attention. It speaks on topics that are important to it, and also transfers them into a common field.
Yakut mythology divides the world into three levels, the Upper (Uohe doidu) - the habitat of gods and light spirits, the Lower (Allara doidu) - the kingdom of evil and dark entities and the Middle (Ortho doidu), where people and animals live. It can be assumed that today's focus on the middle world has reached its limit. For many people reality now seems to be an exceptionally thin fabric that tears in our hands.
We are on the verge of dramatic environmental shocks, climate migrations, political and geopolitical battles for resources in the midst of a global pandemic and general political instability. At the same time, we continue to comprehend our presence in the world that we consider our property, reflect on how our imagination and emotions work, construct new meanings and norms, and pay attention to our past. It is these processes that are in the focus of attention of the artists represented at the stand," says curator of the stand Yulia Yusma.
Ksenia Kudrina shows her "pandemic diary". The genre of thoughtful observation and rapid artistic fixation of events that have already become traditional, which will only be comprehended later, is embodied in Ksenia's project in a series of circulation graphics made on the basis of geographical maps, morbidity charts and other forms of visual statistics. Since Ksenia traditionally turns to cartography and statistical data in her practices, for her the most natural artistic reaction to the global chaos of the pandemic was to observe how news feeds from different countries use news about the virus, focusing on figures and events that are beneficial for their agenda.
Anya Enot presents her paintings and ceramics at the stand. The artist observes how her memory works, studies how painting can mix the boundaries of the real and the imaginary. Anna's field of artistic research is a fine line between the facts of our real biographies and those images that came to us from the outside, eventually becoming an integral part of personal history. A gray zone between the memory of real facts and nostalgic mirages constructed by consciousness under the influence of the moment or desire.
Selena Shestakova also works with memory, but more literal, accurate memory. The brightness of her works is a hypertrophied image of rare periods of colorful summer Yakutia, such as the artist remembers it from her early childhood. In the colored spots of the Yakut forests and fields, the artist weaves traditional motifs of Yakut graphics, which her ancestors described this nature long before the appearance of realistic painting.
Graphic artist Nadezhda Komissarova comes even closer to the popular Yakut motifs. Her textile works, observing the tradition of the Yakut manner of drawing and carving, depict exactly the Middle world of people filled with animals and plants.
The artist Ien Sur makes paper to be used in her works from recycled receipts. The manifestation of the importance of the environmental agenda, attention to the fact that an artist can and should also be responsible in relation to the materials that he uses for work, are combined in her art with images of human emotions as fragile and ephemeral structures that escape a certain interpretation, as if remaining in space until rational consciousness.
The central installation of the stand is a project by Dunya Zakharova. This is a reminiscence of the architectural features of Yakutsk, the largest settlement built in the permafrost zone. All buildings in Yakutsk stand on deeply driven piles so that the heat from the buildings does not melt the permafrost, and thermal and electrical communications are brought to the surface, as they freeze underground. Due to the defrosting of soils, many bases of foundations are in a deplorable state, massive plexuses of pipes and wires that are not covered in any way envelop the public spaces of the city. These piles and communications of the artist become the trunks of concrete trees supporting the "crown-city", which simultaneously echoes the mythology of the Yakuts (the sacred tree Aal Luuk Mas is a symbol of the triune world, stratified into spaces of people and spirits), and with the spontaneous nature of many urban solutions on the territory of Yakutsk. Citizens perceive such gradually decrepit parts of the landscape as familiar and natural, since they have been living among them for decades. Dunya Zakharova hyperbolizes this perception, in her work concrete becomes alive, has natural forms, grows with knobs. Like centuries-old trees, warped by time and climate, old piles continue to be the support of a whole cultural layer and hundreds of thousands of people who preserve it.