Hi, Roma! First of all - congratulations with your new solo show!
Let maybe start with your practice? It transformed so much over time. How would you characterize what you are doing now?
Yes, everything we do is like an ongoing series of episodes. In one we work with one material or theme, in another it all transforms and becomes something completely new. It's interesting to notice when I am looking back at my past works, that the initial impulse, a certain DNA, always peeks through in future episodes.
Today I formulate it as the creation of hyper-objects through resetting the material to its original state, a condition devoid of a specific function. It doesn't matter if it's a tank engine or a car engine, once reset, everything becomes one, back to the original point.
In a sense, before our “dialogue” with the material, it is forced to serve, to perform certain functions. When the metall and I meet, I seek to create a situation for its emancipation, an opportunity for it to escape the confinement of a functional form. For it this is just an episode in a series of rebirths, perhaps later he will become something else.
To continue on transformation: in the academy, you studied industrial design. How did you become an artist?
I grew up in a small town, loved to draw and felt an interest in creative professions. So I decided to study design at a university in a neighboring town with a fairly high quality education in this field. I really enjoyed my education in industrial design. The industrial theme runs through what I do all the time nowadays.
I think I got my head turned on pretty well there. Form always follows content. Content gives birth to form. I think that's the most important thing I learnt. My mind has been rewired to cut out the unnecessary, not add to it. For example, I use laser engraving, it's all about «subtraction». I am not drawn to apply a layer to a surface, if I know that I can, on the contrary, subtract it. So, for the most part, I tend not to use new materials. I'm interested in transforming what already exists.
My understanding of myself as an artist started rather with text and typography as expressive tools. When I studied I was impressed by artists who work with words and types: Eric Bulatov, Barbara Kruger, Eric Timothy Carlson, Pokras Lampas and Retna. I wanted to learn how to do the same and had to try.
I had a project where I spent 365 days for 15 minutes each making typographic compositions based on the music I was listening to at the time or the meaning of the text I was working with.. Some artist commissioned some of these things from me on Behance to use in his canvases. I thought, if he can express his ideas through what I do, why don't I try it. I started experimenting with canvases, murals, installations, and gradually the letters transformed into abstractions, then metal appeared....
I've been meaning to ask about it! It's one of your main mediums today. How did you come to work with metal?
I had a big solo project IGЯА (translitiration of a rus. “play”), a series of monochrome canvases. I traveled with it through the western part of Russia in a van. Looking back now, I realize that it helped me to mature a lot personally and professionally. It came to me that painting is a pretty selfish medium, requiring a lot of resources and producing a bunch of non-recyclable waste. Reflecting on it, I stopped painting. But I realized that I could express what I thought was important in any other way: dancing, recording sound or video, even bringing a rock from the yard. I'm sure this is taught in professional art schools, but I didn't have that experience at the time, and it turned out to be empirical to get there. I might not have discovered a new planet for other people with this understanding, but I certainly discovered it for myself.
I started trying everything: moving in the frame, taking my artworks outside, creating a site-specific installation, exploring digital spaces.
But the metal appeared thanks to a fortunate coincidence.
And how did that happen? How did you get into the foundry? After all, it's not often you meet an artist who works in a factory.
In the spring of 2020 when I was living in Yekaterinburg and still working on finding a new practice I accidentally met some guy who was doing a front garden in the yard of the house I lived in. I'd been helping him plant for a week, and when it came to what each of us did, it turned out he was the director of a foundry Intermold. I replied that I was an artist, and I was looking for a new medium.
"Maybe if you're looking for something, you'll find it in the workshop." That's where I first tried working with metal the way I'd done with paint on my last canvases. It was exactly what I was looking for.
The atmosphere of a huge workshop, far outside the city in the woods, and the people who work there. It's dangerous work, high temperatures, physical exertion, smoke, soot. They are engaged in production with total dedication in a modern world where most are engaged in selling. The openness and trust of the foundry management and workers is a great asset. I am very grateful that they let me into the workshop.
But there's another important detail. Because I started working in the shop and mentioned it in a conversation with my relatives, I accidentally learnt the story of my great-grandmother, who was also a steel worker. She was miraculously rescued in a rescue barge bombing during World War II and evacuated to the Urals from Crimea. I felt some kind of continuity, some natural right to work with this material as well as some humanistic meaning in my interaction with it.
So I found my roots in the front garden.
Today, you're putting down those very found roots in a new place. Tell me, how did you end up in France? And I take, this story is very related to A190B2 in the vitrines, isn't it?
At the end of January 2022, I noticed a tank engine that had arrived at the workshop together with car engines. It had been lying there for quite a long time, it was bulky, and in order to remelt it, you had to work hard to see it into pieces. I noticed it, documented it, and in early February I made a series of objects from it.
It was a story about the transformation of something aggressive into something the opposite of aggression. At the end of February of 2022, Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine broke out. While even the word "war" was not allowed to be pronounced in Russia at that time, I thought that carrying this melted down tank engine with me would be a way to express my position and a hidden protest. The object attracted attention and provoked questions from passers-by. Impressed, they shared their stories and thoughts about the war. At that time in March it was especially felt that people wanted to share their anxiety about what was happening and to talk to someone. There were more and more such dialogues. I did not want to miss them, I wanted to preserve them. I began to write them down, and this practice continues to this day as I continue to carry my objects with me every day.
Against a background of tightened censorship, mobilisation and numerous arrests of people who disagreed with the war, increasingly I realised that it was not safe to stay in Russia and continue my practice.
And what was next?
So, even though I moved away, I haven't stopped collect these conversations with people from Russia, France, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany and turned them into a book called A190B2.
This book was published six months after the war started and 55% of the money I give to humanitarian aid to Ukraine. While the exposition in Basel is going on, I am thinking of publishing the second part of the book.
I've also found the sound side in these things in talking to strangers. These things are ring. In this context, people often recall the story of bells being melted down into weapons during military conflicts. People associate these sounds with bells in temples of different faiths.
Did something change for you in France in working with metal?
I was looking for a way to continue working with metal for quite a long time, in the same technique that I developed in Urals. I had never before planned to leave the Urals and study in another country. In HEAR, where I study, glass and wood are also available as materials but I don’t use them. It's important for me to have an understanding of why I'm using certain material, and with metal I have this match. In France, I wrote to many foundries hoping to work there but unfortunately got no response, that was really frustrating.
But I was able to find a car workshop full of aluminium parts and I just needed a kiln. Atelier Artist’s in Exile helped me to find support from the L'ADAGP foundation to buy it.
That's how I got a proper tool to work, which to this day stands in the university’s backyard. But finding the material was still challenging. Benjamin Gratia, a master laser engraver, recommended a place I’d “definitely love». “Just go there," he said.
It turned out to be a car graveyard, dismantled for parts and sorted by marks. There I finally managed to negotiate the purchase of unusable parts.
So I put down my roots in the car graveyard.
You're also part of the 111%TЯNSPÁRENT project, something between art and fashion. Tell me a bit about it?
It's a collective project where the main ideologist and founder is Onek4ever. It's a series of transparent cassette boxes with found objects within them which can be worn everywhere.
In 111%TЯANSPÁRENT, our practice is similar to archeology of daily. Onek4ever collects real finds and I collect digital finds from the internet that fit into these little screens. Because of the limitations of the screens I use, the artifacts I find are always transformed, and this is also a kind of dialogue with the medium, similar to what I do with metal.
And lastly. You have a pretty popular instagram and you actively use it regularly doing performative streams and sharing your practice. How do you see this platform, how do you work with it?
I can say for sure that I really appreciate and respect this app. Thanks to it, I had my first opportunity to share what I do.
At some point, I realised that my account is a gallery, because I didn't have a physical gallery, I didn't exhibit much. And on the platform I could create a space that anyone could enter from anywhere in the world. Even though the format is very limited, that's how it happened, from the beginning, and that's how I still treat my account.
Interestingly, the interface itself is set up as if you are, indeed, entering an exhibition. I've always had a problem with the titles of artworks, and I noticed that each photo in the account is signed like an explication in an exhibition: the artist's name is on top, and underneath it there is a tool that suggests a title — a geotag. And these principles of geotag naming I brought to my sculpture objects to connect them with places, stories and artifacts over the world.
Thanks a lot for this conversation!
