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.