“My skin is my business”

exhibition by Maria Kulikovska

19.07.2019 – 30.08.2019

Maria Kulikovska

Throughout her practice and difficult path as an artist, Maria Kulikovska constantly returns to architecture, and inevitably uses the skills of design and spatial thinking gained over many years of studying the architecture of buildings and structures to present as sharply and difficult as possible his idea of the human body. the female body in public space.

Maria’s path as an architect, artist, and performer began in the ’90s on the coast of two seas – the Black and Azov, in Crimea. It was born at the turn of the century when the state decided to start Perestroika and move to capitalism and market relations. But it turned out differently, a country that Maria had never seen, but in which she saw the world, disappeared and did not have time to get acquainted with her. Since childhood, the artist’s secret “friends” were the ruins of ancient settlements and settlements of Kerch, scattered throughout the artist’s hometown.

Some of her prints after the war in Donbas remained in the Donetsk gallery “Isolation”. The militants seized the gallery and used the molds as targets for firing. This was a serious shock for Kulikovskaya, which she reflected in a project for London’s Saatchi Gallery, where in 2015, being completely naked, she smashed the molds of her own body with a hammer. This helped the artist to live through the pain caused by the annexation of her native Crimea and the ensuing war.

The ancient Greeks used statues of female bodies, calling them Caryatids, to support the construction of the building, thus giving a rather cruel and patriarchal connotation to a woman who holds all the weight and power of the building, carrying a constant burden on her shoulders. All this was a reminder of the place in the society of every real woman and her punishment. Observations of the woman’s hard work, her invisibility, and lack of worthy recognition caused the artist a growing revolt and the desire to change it through her works.

The exhibition presents more than a dozen sculptures of Maria’s body, which were made in co-authorship with Oleg Vinnichenko with paraffin, epoxy resins, soap, plaster, and chocolate. All of them capture the transformations of the artist’s body. Feeling like women in modern Ukraine, the vulnerability of the female body and the inequality of the sexes – is the dominant motives of her works.

“We made a series of ballistic soap busts in collaboration with Ukrainian designer Ruslan Baginskiy for a fashion wiki in Paris and it just arrived from Paris. They were exhibited during the couture show of their hats. There is a conceptual layering here: 7 years ago I made a cast of myself and made it out of soap, and we put them in the center of the modern sculpture “Isolation” in Donetsk. This was done to see how the soap would transform. This brings us back to the tradition of vanitas when a person is presented as a soap bubble and emphasizes how fragile human life is. The Lesser Dutch used to draw cut flowers as a reminder of death and that it always walks by its side. Using this tradition, I made such sculptures. I made this experiment by installing these sculptures, but then the war began, the process of occupation in the Donbas began, and my sculptures were used by the invaders and shot. They said that this is a naked female body, calling it a degenerate artist. Since that moment, being on the black list of Russia and not allowed to enter Crimea, art has become reflective. And in June, 20014, after 5 years, I again make soap, and soap sculptures and introduce flowers to them.

Completely fresh item. Soap. I suddenly became a migrant, I was in Sweden and I was invited to London to show my sculptures to repeat a series of casts of myself, and I started looking for soap in Sweden and found a sufficient amount of soap at one factory and told the whole story about what I was going to do with this soap by showing pictures. The manager of this factory was surprised and told that soap blocks the size of a man are used to test weapons. Soap has the same density as the human body because it is 80 percent water and glycerin. When the bullets hit, people can see the trajectory of the bullet and what happens to the body.

These sculptures from the “Stardust” series were made for a project at the Mystetsky Arsenal on February 26th. We made 125 square meters of exactly the same material

The main idea: we came out of the earth and we are leaving for the earth. Why Stardust? It is a mirage of a lost home. What is the land of the Kerch Peninsula.

This winter for a Swiss film. I made a live performance with a Mosin rifle,” – the artist Mariya Kulikovska emphasizes.

PRESS

Google Calendar

iCal Export