Art Practice
In her art projects Margarita Kuleva mainly uses social practice and performance as methods. In particular, she explores the ‘behind the scenes’ of cultural institutions to give greater visibility for the invisible workers of culture. In the last two years, Margarita has been developing performative lectures as approach to deconstruct dominating forms of hierarchized production of knowledge.
The Arrival
December 2021
The Arrival is a series of three performative lectures commissioned by Pushkin House (UK, London), exploring changing relations between space, body, and culture in the context of new travel. The project was structured around auto ethnographic experience and a historical investigation of culture in motion. As the result of COVID (and partly Brexit), the new travel not only causes anxiety and identity crises but also opens up a broader debate on how body and culture are connected at liminal non-sites of borders. How do borders transform cultural identities? What is the connection between the arrival of culture and physical arrival? Is it even possible to arrive in the context of new travel?
Supporting team Robin Mitchell, Nikira Yurov, Alexander Uttu
Stage design Riitta Hakkarainen
On the 1st June 2021, Russia implemented the so-called law ‘On enlightenment activity’,regulating educational activity beyond official study programs. In respect to the new law, Margarita Kuleva and her students, decided to explore what enlightenment means now. In this experimental project, we not protested against the new law, but looks for less hierarchical and more inclusive forms of public education.
{min}enlightenment is a mini-series of performative lectures in unsuitable places: auto-repair garages, swimming pools and beauty salons. These new public-private spaces supplement the traditional ‘Salons of Enlightenment’, and as thus, the project aims to widen its definition beyond the traditional Eurocentric perspective. All of the performances were streamed on YouTube. We are min and mean enlightenment. We will not make you better.
{min} enlightenment
June 2021
The Privilege of
Presence
May-June 2020
The Privilege of Presence is a media project by Margarita Kuleva and Viktor Kudryashov in the framework of the Garage Reflections project in May-June 2020. The project consists of an essay on cultural institutions during the pandemic and a media object, that was at the same time exhibited in Moscow (at Garage website) and Berthold art centre in Saint Petersburg, closed because of the pandemic. The media object was located in an empty exhibition hall, closed because of COVID. 34 light boxes ‘exit’ constituted the word ‘Museum’. The object was connected to the Garage Museum website and every time there was a new visitor at the website on the ‘exit’ light boxes was on. The audience could see how the object changes via live-streaming for a week.
