Opening evening: March 9, 6 PM
Exhibition: March 10-25
Opening hours: Wed-Fri, 3-7 PM
Artist talk: March 18, 6 PM
On a junction of theory and art practice, through the means of photography and moving image, the project DEGREES (2021) dives into the framework of contemporary affect theory and approaches the question on personal, collective, and transitive levels. At every stage, the work is challenged to find artistic means of expression of the concept, which is considered to be undetectable directly. Past events can be conserved in the body and brain and repeated; they can be reactivated but not completed. This brings us very close to the mechanism of traumatic recollection. Taking it as a method and distancing from it, the artist is experimenting with performative practices and detecting vague, diaphane disruptures of the visual reverberations to come up with a tangible notion of affect.
In the video part titled Degrees, Angles, Ripped Pieces of Pink Pyjamas (2021) Yurkova creates a space of a patchwork narrative, describing individual unsettling, traumatising life events; she pushes off the concept of place as a memory hub and moves it to the field of outspoken. The narrative is built, so that speech can proximate the bodily inhabitancy of the event and cause a reaction. The artist formulates a hypothesis – through the mechanism of affect transmission personal memory can be 'delegated' and 'lived out' by another person from a different domain of origin, language, and dwelling.
The movement from personal to political Yurkova continues in the part Degrees, Plains, and Two Stumbles Ahead (2021) rendered as a photographic installation.
The artist studies the traumatic experiences of individuums relating themselves to the collective body of resistance: civilians who physically and morally suffered fighting for their rights or rights of the groups to which they relate. The process of reenaction of the scenes of violence, postures and bodily sensations was focused on the motion prolonged in time, as well as on the changing power dynamics and transforming pain into a dance.
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Ksenia Yurkova is an artist, curator, and researcher, living between Austria and Russia. She considers her leading artistic media to be text, photography, video, and installation. Yurkova started her practice as a researcher in the field of political and communication theory. The main focus of her interest for a long time was communication and language: the varieties of its substance, the possibility of conversion, its mythological aspect, stereotyping (the question of personal and political identification), problems of memory, attitudes, and reliance. Lately, the artist is researching the phenomenon of affect in its autonomous bodily emanation; in its personal and political registers. She focuses upon how a stage of individual perception, to which one can relate memory, traumatic recollection, and problems of identity construction, transforms itself into affects of the political body.
Ksenia Yurkova has taken part in numerous shows and festivals, has released several artist books, and launched an artist-in-residence research program InSilo in Lower Austria.
kseniayurkova.com
As a part of FOTO WIEN 2022 programme
Supported by BMKÖS and KULTUR NIEDERÖSTERREICH
