Join us on Tuesday, 20 June for an artist talk by Katya Muromtseva, whose current exhibition Women in Black Against the War is on show at Pushkin House until 29 July. In conversation with Professor Sarah Wilson she will discuss her most recent series of portraits of activists and political prisoners as well her artistic practice in general.Katya explored political themes in her work long before the full-scale Russian invasion started. In her videos, watercolours and installations she reflects on historical memory, collective action, political representation and nostalgia. She has always experimented with various exhibition formats and explored the conditions in which culture is produced and presented.
Her artist's statement says: "Through my practice I try to find new forms of existence within the hierarchical social and cultural systems of society: the possibility to renew historical narratives, the possibility to reconfigure methods of exhibition display, the possibility to share the means of production with other artists, the possibility of actual solidarity. My primary artistic focus is on large-scale paintings, videos and installations which refer to personal and collective memory, feature historical obscurities, and unfold in both lyrical and conceptual ways. Within my works I’m asking where the border is between reality and fantasy; I am interested in the narrative where document and artistic imagination overlap. It reflects on my practice in a way of the constant dialogue that I am having with different social groups. Usually this dialogue takes the form of personal narratives that are implemented into my works. I’m asking myself how to be a political artist under authoritarian governments without direct aggressive gestures, but with social empathy embedded in pure visual artistic forms and constant working with people."
About the SPEAKERS
Katya Muromtseva has a background in philosophy and stage design. Her lyrical-conceptual work investigates personal and collective memory through imaginative forms of documentation. She has had solo exhibitions at the M HKA Museum, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow Museum of Contemporary Art, XL Gallery, Art Front Gallery, and Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial among others. She was part of a group show at Steirischer Herbst Festival in 2018 and 2022. In 2019 she was an artist-in-residence at Garage Studios & Art Residencies Moscow. In 2020 she was a resident at WHW Academy in Zagreb. The same year she was a winner of the Present Continuous program of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp (M HKA). She has received the “Innovation” contemporary art prize in 2020 and Fulbright fellowship in 2020-2022. She was listed in Forbes Russia "30 under 30" in 2020. Her exhibitions and individual works were covered by ArtForum, The Economist, The New York Times, The World, and TokyoArtBeat among others. During the summer of 2022 she received the Edmund Muskie professional fellowship. Currently she is a teaching fellow at VCU Arts School.
Sarah Wilson is Professor of of Modern and Contemporary art at The Courtauld, University of London. She published The Visual World of French Theory: Figurations, 2010 (French 2018) and Picasso/Marx and Socialist Realism in France, 2013. She was principal curator of Paris, Capital of the Arts, 1900-1968 (Royal Academy London, Guggenheim Bilbao, 2002-3) and Pierre Klossowski, Whitechapel Art Gallery, 2006. She is preparing an anthology of her writings on over thirty women artists: SHE+ART. She first travelled to the USSR in 1981 and has visited regularly, last to the opening of GES2 in Moscow in December 2021. She has supervised several theses on Russian art and published on artists Oleg Kulik, Alexander Ponomarev and Semyon Fabisovich (State Tretyakov Gallery, 2019). Appointed Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in 1997she was awarded the AICA (International Association of Art Critics) prize in 2015.