Mariia Aligozhina
Russian contemporary artist, animator, illustrator, director, creator of the trash-jewelry project Kuleeema, curator of educational projects of the Big Cartoon Festival, lecturer in animation and illustration at the HSE School of Design.
My area of interests includes a gender issue, where the objects for research are the relationships between men and women in family and out-of-family situations, as well as the processes of self-determination of a young woman and an artist.
A few years ago an exhibition about the wedding was held at the MMOMA (Gogolevsky bld., 10). Now I dream to make an exhibition there titled "Is it you in me or me", the subject of which is the divorce I experienced in 2018. In Russia, divorce is still a stigmatized topic, so it is my aim to take the artistic dirt out of the hut and reveal through participatory practices the moment of separation of one person from another, the abusive relationship, institute of modern love and anarchy of love.
As a form of manifestation of women in society, I am interested in the phenomenon of contemporary jewelry. Since 2015, I have been running the Kuleeemа project. As my main practice, I collect various artifacts on the street and make jewelry out of them. Such objects of traditionally male material culture as wires, ceramics, wood, plastic, nuts and screw, become trash-jewelry ornaments for necklaces of any sex, a trap for other people's attention and a reason for a small talk. This is ready-made jewelry and conscious consumption of jewelry. I use found objects as a method to study the social anthropology of place.
As a young female-artist, I am curious to explore the field of the contemporary art system to discover new forms of interaction with it, exploring the boundaries of my own artistic manifestation. During my residence at the Open Studios I have created a series of mini-galleries under the general title ‘Gallery tруба’ (trumpet) . The ‘tруба’ is a gallery for displaying the small forms of artistic expression, placed at different times in different spots: a used nightstand, chest of drawers and a small home-made house. I am a self-made artist. I am my own institution.
Stas Shuripa, Russian artist, curator, lecturer at ICA (Moscow).
Mariia’s art practice is quite open for experimentation and has a potential to growth in various directions such as objects, performances and installations. Using her methods once can explore the role of the artist and the viewer in the process of production of meanings from the different perspectives.
