The exhibition “Inappropriate Touches” by Anna Zvyagintseva took place at the PinchukArtCentre in Kyiv. Anna told Bird In Flight whether artists can form a united front, how motherhood influences creativity, and why we all should feel our presence at war or near war.
Anna Zvyagintseva is a Kyiv-based artist, laureate of the Special Prize of the PinchukArtCentre Prize 2015 and finalist of the PinchukArtCentre Prize 2017. Her new project “Inappropriate Touches” (curated by Tetyana Kochubinska) is an artistic exploration of the nature of touch. It is about the kinds of touches of loving people; people who find themselves in war conditions or a conflict society; acquaintances and those who met by chance. Love and hate, war and peace, friendship and enmity are reflected in bodily practice. Through drawing, photography, sculpture, and animation, Zvyagintseva transfers the collision into an exhibition and discussion space.
Speaking about your exhibition, Ukrainian artist Vlada Ralko noted one important feature — sterility. It seems to me this is a very apt description of the feeling that arises while being in your exposition. One can draw a parallel with a hospital space where a doctor diagnoses problems in a person’s body and treats them. Do you feel like a doctor who intervenes in social corporeality?
I often use the method of cleansing: I remove everything unnecessary, exposing and revealing the theme that interests me. I take different materials, look for different points of view, and then bring everything to a state where only the essential remains.
The exhibition space can be called a laboratory with bright light, where the artist creates certain conditions for the viewer to meet the artwork, triggering reflections through the rules of the game established in this place. But I myself do not fully understand the theme I take on and work to understand it — so I cannot “heal” viewers by showing them a certain course of things. Rather, we have a shared “game of understanding,” in which my task is to invent the rules.
The theme of touches, which I speak about at the exhibition, is implicit, ambiguous, and exposing it is a surgically responsible task.
I think the exhibition “Anonymous Society,” located at the PinchukArtCentre right before mine, also played a role in creating the effect of sterility. It is an exhibition of photo and video works with many projections in dark rooms — so my exposition becomes a dazzling space for viewers who have passed through the darkness. When preparing my exhibition, I did not know what would precede it, but when I saw the two exhibitions together, I liked this effect.
How did the theme of touch arise in your practice?
For the first time, I caught myself paying special attention to this theme during participation in street protest actions. When you go out into the protest space, you think about your safety: whether your body will be harmed. You do not put this in the foreground, but you still feel co-presence in the same space with sources of danger. When you are physically present on the street, in the square, you seem to articulate your protest through your body, signaling what you are ready to do. During preparations for protests, information spreads among participants about how to protect themselves and what to do if a confrontation is unavoidable.
Street protest does not exist without the body, without its presence on the street in joint action with other bodies. And I was interested in observing and developing the theme of how you interact with other people at a protest. Maidan sharpened my attention: among the crowd — anonymous, huge, filling the entire visible space — there arises euphoria and the feeling that you are all one body. This aspect of implicit bodily touch is one of those I wanted to reveal in the exhibition.
Another reason why this theme surfaced in my art is my new experience of motherhood, which involves a lot of corporeality.
When you talk about touches, about the body, it seems everyone understands what it is about. But it is a purely individual experience. The experience of articulating bodily sensations in our society and in our language is small — so sometimes it may seem that this experience is inexpressible.
How do you combine these two experiences — being a mother and an artist?
The most obvious is the lack of free time.
It is harder to talk about this further. Motherhood is a unique, inexpressible experience. One experience of motherhood is not identical to another, although each individual maternal experience consists of routine, identical actions. You will never find precise enough words to describe bodily experience — in motherhood, this manifested especially vividly for me.
I created a work in which I tried to speak about something similar — “Single Records.” The starting material was a sheet from an office supply store with pen and marker scribbles, which I embroidered on white canvas. The automatism of these scribbles makes them similar to each other, although each is the work of an individual person. The collective ornament is a product of typologically identical but uncoordinated actions. The weave of scribbles is a product of similarity in difference. It was a modest monument to unique routine actions.
In the online magazine “Prostory,” you run the column “Drawing of Wartime,” where you publish works of your colleagues. What do you mean by the concept of “drawing of wartime”?
Currently, my authorship is in a lull, but this is temporary. The very title “Drawing of Wartime” contains two meanings: it is not only, and sometimes not so much, a drawing made during the war — but primarily what kind of drawing is created through the war.
Roughly speaking, it is about how war influences the character of the image — both its creation and perception. I can take works by artists who absolutely did not speak about the war, but this will be my view as a curator and a person from a country living in war conditions. Through this prism, I look at my colleagues’ works and try to build a certain sequence from the images they created, which I show in this section. In the future, perhaps this project will develop into an exhibition space or in the form of a book.
Often there are no comments from me there — mostly I take comments from artists from their interviews, which, in my opinion, most accurately correspond to the work. Sometimes I allow myself to give a small explanation — for example, why crosses are constantly present in Roman Uranek’s works. But the text is only a hint; I prefer visual language.
You said that the theme of war is not chosen — only the point of view is chosen. How difficult is it for an artist to find it?
In those works of mine that are directly related to this theme, I talk about what the artist’s gaze is and how he or she can speak about it. There are other authors close to me who speak about the war in more detail: they analyze the basics of the concept of “war,” try to talk about terminology, return to the essence of war, removing details.
It is important to understand that we are all participants in events. And I would like all of us to feel our presence at war or near war, not closing our eyes to what is happening. My artistic approach in this case is that I consider how war colors peaceful processes, how the echo of war reaches each person and, thanks to this, can influence everyday life.
Can an artist influence society during war and to what extent?
It seems to me that one should not nurture illusions that someone will bring practical changes here through art — except perhaps quite modest ones, at the level of propaganda.
If you feel that this theme is important to you, you cannot not speak about it. Undoubtedly, I look for opportunities to do and say what I want, to find like-minded people — and simply people interested in my view.
Is the existence of a “united artistic front” possible today?
Artists form a “front” not with art, but with their civic position. What art they make may not be so important in this case. It is important that they sometimes gather together to articulate political positions and can say something.
Quickly uniting around some conjuncture to show “works on the theme” seems wrong to me — although it may attract public attention for a short time.
If in the story with the Art Arsenal and the work of Volodymyr Kuznetsov all artists recognized that this could not be done, the situation would have been different, and the Ukrainian art scene would be completely different today. But in reality, only a small part of the community supported the protest. I do not put the effectiveness of the protest in place of its ethical meaning, but the “united front” is determined by the number of those who participate.
Accordingly, this raises the question of what they are ready to sacrifice for this unity.
In your practice, you turn to drawing as a theme and as a method. How flexible is it?
Drawing is a very good theme: a theme itself, not just a means. I often dissect the very idea of the line that draws, as a line that thinks, and I want to develop this further and further in my practice. For me, the idea of drawing is connected with how a person thinks.
Recently, any theme that interests me somehow finds its reflection precisely in drawing. And I am curious to see to what stage I will come when there is absolutely nothing left of drawing — whether I can exhaust it for myself.
How did the academic environment influence you? Has the “Kyiv school” found reflection in your practice?
When I studied painting at the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture, only self-education could give a more or less complete picture even of the local art history. Only recently have they started talking about this period and these artists at the Academy — but sometimes this conversation is simply inadequate: it is covering emptiness with loud names like Kazimir Malevich.
In fact, I do not know what the “Kyiv school” is and whether it exists.
Certainly, the Academy’s theme is now receiving considerable attention because it marks its centenary. But this happens against the backdrop of an increasingly obvious crisis of the Ukrainian post-Soviet system of art education.
I am a third-generation artist: my grandfather, father, and mother are artists. Being in such an environment, among artists and books, was my introduction to art, to how an artist lives and works. However, I engage in completely different things than my parents and grandfather.
In the project I made with my father’s “sculptures” (actually twisted candy wrappers he made during moments of reflection), I wanted to draw attention to the fact that my father does not only work at the easel but also in life. I called it art, although he did not call it that. It was a kind of “pseudo-art” that I appropriated, translating the “artistic” into the very act of choosing and naming.