As part of our Crevices in Myth exhibition, join us via Zoom for a related event Powerful Gift: a conversation with artist Ekaterina Muromtseva and anthropologist Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov. The pair are going to discuss Muromtseva's work, the performative and symbolic significance of presents to the powerful, the relationship between people and their rulers in contemporary Russia and what artistic observation shares with the practices of academic field research.
Ekaterina Muromtseva’s work A Tough Male Portrait forms part of the exhibition ‘Crevices in Myth’ (14 September-7 November 2021) which presents work of three Russian artists reflecting on post-Soviet identities and the chasms caused by the differences between utopian thinking and reality. A Tough Male Portrait depicts a tennis player and amateur artist who embarks on a journey, both physically and spiritually, in search of ideal masculinity embodied in the master of the land, the irreplaceable Russian president Vladimir Putin.
Ekaterina Muromtseva, A tough male portrait, 2019, film still. Courtesy of the artist.
Ekaterina Muromtseva is a visual artist with a background in philosophy and stage design, whose lyrical-conceptual work investigates personal and collective memory through imaginative forms of documentation. She works with different media: installations, videos, graphics, socially engaged art. She has had solo exhibitions at the M HKA Museum, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow Museum of Contemporary Art, XL Gallery and was part of a group show at Steirischer Herbst Festival in 2018. In 2019 she was an artist-in-resident at Garage Studios & Art Residencies Moscow. The same year she was a winner of the Present Continuous programme of the V-A-C Foundation and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp (M HKA). She received the 'Innovation' contemporary art prize in 2020 and a Fulbright fellowship in 2020-2022.
Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov is an associate professor of anthropology at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg, Russia. His book publications includeTwo Lenins: a Brief Anthropology of Time (University of Chicago Press, 2017) andThe Social Life of the State in Subarctic Siberia (Stanford University Press, 2003). In 2006 he co-curated a major exhibition 'Gifts to the Leaders', organised by the Moscow Kremlin Museums.
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