My art practice centres around critical exploration of culture and knowledge production via methods of performance, social practice and institutional interventions. As an interdisciplinary artist, I intentionally don’t separate art, research, and my curatorial practice, and find the intersection of the three profitable for my work.
In addition to my first degree in liberal arts and training in philosophy, I received an MA in social sciences and was deeply encouraged by methods of anthropology. For the ‘Invisible Visibility’ exhibition (Street Art Museum and Helsinki Art Museum, 2018), I collaborated with the local sticker art community both as an artist and researcher. For my PhD dissertation, I studied laborers of cultural institutions. These materials and the tradition of institutional critique inspired two of my projects. First, in collaboration with Viktor Kudrjashov, I created a media installation ‘The Privilege of Presence’ (Garage Museum, 2020) to reflect on hidden hierarchies in museum space and how they were affected by Covid. To continue on the topic of invisibility, I authored a utopian digital manifesto of (no) future cultural institutions (2021).

My COVID experience and growing political restrictions in the Russian system of education led me to apply performance in public space as my method to work critically with ideas of high culture and the concept of enlightenment. In the {min}enlightenment (2021) series of performances I approached semipublic – semiprivate places as the new salons of enlightenment, and chose three types of them to carry out performative lecturers: a garage (literally ‘a tyre fitting salon’ in Russian), a spa salon and swimming pool, and a beauty salon. All three salons were open to all during the performance as I didn’t want to supplement their spatial organization, soundscape and social practices with mine. I considered the project, not a beautiful plant of education to cultivate, but rather weeds on enlightenment that grow sporadically, tolerate and to be tolerated by other plants, sounds, and agents.

I used the method of performative lectures to explore changing relations between space, body, and culture in the context of COVID travel in my next project ‘The Arrival’ (2021). The project was structured around auto ethnographic experience and a historical investigation of culture in motion. I delivered three performative lectures in the UK in places connected to migration: at the border between the UK and France, at an airfield, in Pushkin House, a London institution devoted to rebellious XIX century poet Alexander Pushkin, who had never been abroad. One of the most recent performative projects, UC Pinkies (2022) was a critical assessment of opportunities for public education in a non-university environment in the US context: I opened an alternative university in a nail salon called Pinkies in Berkeley, for one day.

My current research work is deeply embedded in museum materiality as a social space where cultural hierarchies are both maintained and subverted. One of the performances in production, The Guide of Souls is built on the character of museum babushkas (Russian: бабушка; granny, elderly lady), a typical invisible cultural worker in post-Socialist countries. These elderly ladies, who work as museum guards, have no power in the museum hierarchy but are extremely powerful because of their social position and type of femininity. Playing a babushka, I’ll engage museum visitors in a conversation about cultural production, politics and inequity. Another performance, If Museum Walls Could Talk recently commissioned by Stanford University is dedicated to revealing the "behind the scenes" political struggle for creativity and cultural expression in the context of wartime Russia. It draws upon a variety of less visible protest and dissent actions caused by the new wave of censorship and extreme police brutality. The performance is based on a collection of interviews I conducted with Russian cultural workers since the beginning of the war and self-ethnography.