Elena Ishchenko Curator, researcher, activist
Elena Ishchenko

Currently, I’m a curator of Nomadic Program at Vleeshal Center for Contemporary Art (Middelburg, the Netherlands) together with Maria Sarycheva as part of League of Tenders curatorial duo.

In my practice, I am cultivating a decolonial approach to curating and knowledge production, while addressing power relations inherited from colonial policies, particularly within the russian* context.

Developing various formats such as exhibitions, public programs, lectures, educational practices, workshops, and even personal blogs, I prefer collective and collaborative work that encourage social imagination and change.

I worked as program curator at the Typography Center for Contemporary Art (Krasnodar, Russia), a researcher at the Garage Museum (Moscow, Russia), an editor of aroundart.org, an online journal and developed a number of projects independently in russia, Germany, Armenia, Switzerland, and other countries as well.

Among the projects, I’ve been working on recently is an archive of repressions against cultural workers and artists in russia. I initiated this archive to collect evidence of the persecution and the experiences of people who faced them after or before the large-scale invasion of Ukraine by russia. The goals of the archive are to preserve what is designed to be deleted and to study methods consciously or uncousiously used by the russian state to eliminate any public discussions and force people to leave the country. This archive is non-public.

I’m also a part of the Typography Collective — a group of artists and curators who previously organized the Typography Center for Contemporary Art in Krasnodar, russia. From 2017 to 2022, I worked as a program and exhibition curator there. After the beginning of the large-scale invasion of Ukraine by russia, we stopped our public activities and completely closed our space after being declared a “foreign agent” by the russian government. Now, we continue our work remotely in various places around the globe. Among our recent projects are Translocal Dialogues on Home, Migration, and Solidarity, which I curated and edited. The project initiated a number of discussions about wars, decolonial possibilities, forced migration, and state violence. Typography Collective also hosts an art-in-residence program in Yerevan, Armenia, and develops an education program, previously known as the Krasnodar Institute of Contemporary Art, in which I am involved as an organizer and lecturer.

In 2022–2023, I was involved in curating an exhibition and a series of events titled “Өмә,” organized with nGbK and displayed at Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien in Berlin. By telling the stories of approximately thirty artists from indigenous communities and individuals with migrant identities, developing methods of autoethnography, and working with memory through archives, Өmә aimed to represent the complexity of Russia as a colonial realm.

Cologne, Germany
spot.helena@gmail.com