Kurbatova Anna Biography

Anya Kurbatova: I had two attempts to obtain academic art education, both ended, in the same way, leaving this process some time before the end. Both times this happened for the reason that I was engaged in empty production of useless work and the provision of reporting on this process. But the cause of stagnation was, rather, not with the place itself and not with the relationship between me and the teachers, although they could not be called simple, but rather with the inner feeling that from this activity I then received everything that I needed and possibly get.

Therefore, the most important lesson that I have removed from my studies at an art school and a pedagogical university is that not beneficial can and should be left at any stage, even close to the finish line. On the other hand, this period gave me a set of technical capabilities, understanding what exactly I want to do. Ml: What department did you study at?

AK: Both times I chose a painting department, which is actually not close to me. True, those techniques that I use now in the schedule are partly the consequence of conservative education. Then I had three completely different in intensity and time of experience in non -classical art schools. The first attempt is Bauhaus Summer School Weimar, Germany, graphics course.

The development of the set of practices that I felt there was my first personal exhibition “Instead”. Anya Kurbatova. AK: For several years, I was engaged in casting from gypsum to order and at some point found the absence of any my own ideas in a considerable set of technical skills that are difficult to apply outside expensive interiors. Around the same time, VCSI [Voronezh Center for Modern Art] appeared a room, and there was a repair there.

I decided that I would like to somehow get involved in this process and just wrote that I want to come and help. She began to come to exhibitions more often, communicate, watch and read more. It was very strange, because I was a rather closed person and for me this is an uncharacteristic model of behavior, somehow try to invade the existing community. This continued all the next school experience.

I ended up on the educational course of the VCSI, it was a year. She chose the course of Sergei Ivanovich Gorshkov, submitting an application there for the reason that Sergey Ivanovich works with a tree, and for me this material was unexplained, unsented, I never worked with him. At that moment, constant, intensive work with something that I do not know was important to me at that moment.

Not just to do something unusual for yourself, but also to create the most specific conditions so that everything is new. The next stage of educational practices is the school of involved art “what to do”, which has become a new dimension of both temporality and the degree of immersion. If the first experience is the Bauhaus Summer School - a three -week intensive, when we spent all daylight hours in a constant joint, but individual search process, in discussions, views of other people's work, walks, disputes.

And all this was about one project mainly, but with a very serious side effect of preparatory work. The second story is about regularity, accommodation in everyday rhythm, when you switch to this twice a week, you know that for some time it will be engaged in meditative practice. The school “What to do” is a completely different story. This is when you move, firstly, in space for a significant period of time, you find yourself in a different environment, secondly, you live with people with whom you usually do not live.

This is simultaneously about together in everyday life and together in projects - in real and fictional situations. ML: This experience of collectivity in the school “What to do” somehow influenced you and your art projects? AK: I was wondering if I could work in the team, because by that time my collective experience was limited to participation in several group projects, and I understood that for me it was a rather traumatic process.

It is quite difficult for me to accept interaction in large groups. Each time this is a call for me. It is necessary to integrate your opinion and vision in the general and oxide with the opinion and vision of the rest of the participants and participants. I understood for myself a very important thing that I am prepared to be part of the team in some kind of activity, but I am not ready to be as an artist.

For me, at this stage, art is for the most part individual practice. On the other hand, it is impossible to abolish fragile connections between artists, associations that may take shape for some time for the project, action. In organizational points, I am completely for collective activities, it works for me and seems comfortable, but, in the case of art, I, apparently, is too authoritarian.

AK: Now I see such an opportunity in projects, one way or another related to music, sound. The musical movement is always associated with the community, with the unification of people who can not unite at all.From school examples-we worked with Lena Revunova in one of the training projects, and everything was very cool there, the work organically arose from correspondence and discussion of various common topics, and not from the fact that we specially agreed to do something along with her.

I like it when the associations arise spontaneously when it is some kind of open structure in which you are as long as you feel it. ML: You mean the organization of events or precisely the musical production of AK: probably both. True, this is rather a potential field for further development, because I really have no experience in either. It seems strange to me that musical events and exhibition projects almost always exist autonomously from each other or in the format of performances at the opening: literature and theater preserve the same autonomy.

In my opinion, there are potential in possible intersections, and this is also a way out of a comfortable, “its” circle. I am now interested to embed audio into my projects, if the format allows. The work of Anna Kurbatova at the exhibition "Girls came." Who you liked "before" and who sympathizes with you now? AK: Katte Kolvitz is my first love, since the time of the school. One of the clear examples of the equilibrium of social engagement and the artistic language.

Eve Hesse. In general, I do not really like to highlight the "loved ones", attachments are changing. I did not have “before” and “after”, inadvertently I got a continuous process. All that I have been busy over the past three years is different forms of participation in educational projects and self -education, so “before” is so smeared that I don’t know where to look for “after”.

ML: You said that important topics for you are youth, space and information. According to the results of the school of the involved art “what to do” you had the project “I love you very much, only who are you? It turns out that he connects all your main topics: space as “non-month”, love as the archetypal part of “youth” and “information”, which does not reach the addressee?

AK: We must clarify what I understand by youth, because for me this is not so much an age as a state of readiness for an internal explosion, for implosion. The state of a quiet hysteria, which is just in these letters. It’s rather not even about love, but about desperate attempts to break a communication barrier. Today this is one of the important works for me. I had long had an idea to do work about correspondence through bottle mail, because this is a story about utopia, impossibility, about a cry under water, but also about a dream.

The bottle mail is the most unreliable way to transmit information to someone, but, on the other hand, there is some completely magical stories about how this communication was still being held and the sender found its addressee. Including one of the stories relatively recent - about the salvation of migrants from a drowning ship, when their letter appeal for help in less than a day was near the shore and were found by rescuers.

Another paradox is a law that was adopted in England in a year prohibiting the death of the death penalty to reveal the bottle mail found to anyone except a special person at court, acting until the end of the 18th century. It looks like a plot of sleep: you get a message that cannot be read. Ml: Continuing a conversation about topics. What do you mean by "information"? AK: I have this topic, probably everywhere in one form or another.

This, on the one hand, is a background that surrounds a person and can be very differently revealed, starting from visual images to conditional rules, because everything that we receive either is visually, audibly-this is always proposed by someone. We can perceive this hypertext differently: as a myth, as the rules of the game; As a knowingly true or obviously false message. There are many faces, all this is very subjective and can be perceived in different contexts.

This context is not always set in advance. Just here, it seems to me, and these gaps, distortions, “bottle mail” begin, when one tells the story, and the other perceives it as an absolute truth or aggressive lie. Ml: Just about this was your Resest Nullius project. AK: Any work begins with questions to yourself, which for some reason seem important to me. In the case of this series, I became interested in what is important in a visually oversaturated environment.

This story was a hypothesis that perhaps the present remained only where it is not interesting, there is nothing to think of. There is some kind of fragment of space, about which nothing to speculate, it cannot be provided with additional connotations. It’s just that you can in any form the transmitted stupid texture, one of the other crawling paints. In fact, instead of fragments of urban space in these images, any objects that are just as uninteresting could be.

True, there were even more questions from the transfer of a conditionally “street” gallery left-fragments began to live another life, for themselves, in general, unnatural. Anya Krabatova. Res nullius.AK: This is on the one hand - the space of the city, streets, maze. On the other hand - a cavity, shelter. I am worried about one and the other, and the border between them.

ML: You have several projects, partly related to Voronezh, but which, as you said, could be made in any city. For you, Voronezh is of great importance or could you live in another city? AK: I would like to live in other places, but for me the issue of space, environment, is quite important and the process of choice should be agreed with many conditions.

I am rather for a temporary stay than for starting the roots. But while I continue to be based in a place that seems to me more or less comfortable [in Voronezh]. Most projects about the place are loaded with my own stories. For example, a project about clubs-“empty many”-is fixed, of course, not all consolidating locations that have ever been here, but this is largely about me-teenage.

I would like to somehow investigate this topic in other cities, but rather in a different form-more detached, from the perspective of a kind of anthropologist. AK: I used to be absolutely comfortable here, especially given the possibility of moving, which I try to use as often as possible. Now there is a feeling that I am stomping in place, and it's time to change something. Either switch to some new level here, or change the location.