![About. Ksenia Markelova, multidisciplinary artist, Yekaterinburg](https://i.wfolio.ru/x/5xNn7C6DkMbo--4Gcepjjnb0wXWgc9E0/mvNnVANPaOqhO2R2QOLm46hKfMq6K2ux/JEps4hX9_zQVA9CIE3zEM047-5kf1mc8/bjMGnESce6bWrOEo6HknFyS5DrJzJ8E1/NyZeYkroQvKGRH8qDvqen3lF5Lc5ubl3/_OVUYDgtD4E.jpg)
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Bio:
Ksenia was born in the city of Kamensk-Uralsky in 1994. Lives and works in Yekaterinburg. Ksenia studied at the Ural State University of Architecture and Art at the Department of Graphics and Animation. Participates in exhibitions since 2016.
Artist statement:
“Art is the labour closest to life”
Ksenia’s practice is in the field of Fear and Desire, and their mixtures. The visual aesthetics of the artist’s work addresses the politics of the body and sex. Corporality here is not in itself. She seeks liberation — in love, and from violence.
Working with the intimate, sacred, vulnerable and painful leads the artist to Horror as an intense, heightened reality in which empathy is opposed monstrous malignant formations.
From a combination of an attraction to horror, the phenomenon of empathy and education in the field of directing and animation, a narrative appears in Ksenia’s works, a penchant for creating creepypastas.
The newest discourse for the artist was the Absurd — as a method of resistance to the last frontier of anguish. Along with it, Ksenia’s glossary was replenished with non-human characters who, in addition to their own semantic load, reflect the artist’s fatigue with anthropocentrism.
This fatigue also finds a way out through the landscape, the surface aesthetics of which the artist fills with a sense of hidden anxiety and threat.
Ksenia works with installation and sculpture in mixed media (fabric, silicone, epoxy resin, wax), oil pastel graphics, puppet animation and video art, 3D modeling.
In an effort to unite all her mediums, and at the same time begin to work more totally and spatially, the artist turns to digital art, and looks for ways to mutually exit — the virtual into the real, and vice versa.
Some group exhibitions, biennials:
2024 “I love you, don’t be afraid of anything”, Art Gallery of the Yeltsin Center, Yekaterinburg.
2024 “Archipelago of Dreams”, Sinara Gallery, Yekaterinburg, 07. 02 — 26.05.
2024 “Myths and Reality Lessons”, Ural Vision Gallery, Yekaterinburg, 02.02 — 20.04.
2023 Port Art Fair, Sevkabel port, St. Petersburg, 26.05 — 28.05.
2023 “Don’t trust silence, it’s deceptive”, contemporary art center “Byl’”, Stary Oskol, 20.04 — 20.07.
2022 “Swamping the guise” joint exhibition with artist Svetlana Spirina, curated by “Temporary Solution”, Museum “Metenkov’s House”, Yekaterinburg, 27. 10 — 25. 12.
2022 Partisan street art festival “Carte Blanche”, Yekaterinburg.
2022 Uralskaya Kvartirale, Yekaterinburg, April.
2022 “Finding the sense of the body”, Sinara Gallery, 10.03 — 10.04.
2021 Partisan street art festival “Carte Blanche”, Yekaterinburg, 01.08 — 31.08.
2021 “Museum of Artificial History”, Darwin Museum, Moscow, 5.07-13.09.
2021 “What Mermaids Sing About”, Artetazh Museum, Vladivostok, 23.04-23.05.
2021 “New Painting of Yekaterinburg”, Art Gallery of the Yeltsin Center, 31.01 — 14.03.
2020 BLAZAR Young Art Fair, Moscow 09.09-13.09.
2020 Video exhibition “Lightblick”, Kunsthalle am Hamburger Platz, Berlin.
2020 “L’ŒIL CLOS, MONSTRES MERVEILLEUX”, Le Cyclop, Milly-la-Forêt, France, 27.06 — 27.09.
2019 “Better don’t touch it’, Issmag gallery, Moscow.
2019 2 5th Ural Industrial Biennale of Contemporary Art, main project, installation “Room”, Optical and Mechanical Plant; 2 unnamed installations, former cinema “Coliseum”, Yekaterinburg.
2019 “Klavier”, Apollo bar, Krasnodar.
2017 4th Ural Industrial Biennale of Contemporary Art, research project, installation “Visualization Blocks”.
2016 “Non-random connections”, Ural branch of the NCCA, Yekaterinburg.
Residencies:
2024 Residency in workshops of Garage museum.
2023 Digital residency “Phygital Bodies in Speculative Landscapes” by CCI Fabrika and 8xr.
2022 — 2024 Residency in workshops of The Ural branch of The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts.
2021 Residency “Black cube/White box”, Meyerhold Theatre Center, Moscow, 13.11 — 22.11.
2018 Art Residency during October, 2025 Kunst und Kultur gallery, Hamburg, Germany.
Personal exhibitions:
2019 “(inside)out”, Center of the City Culture, Perm.
2018 “Duality and the Gap”, Center for Contemporary Dramaturgy, Yekaterinburg.
2017 “Altar for the slaughter of hands”, Cultural Transit Foundation, Yekaterinburg.
Curatorial projects:
2023 “Non-obvious responses”, exhibition based on the results of the laboratory with the inclusive project “Sketches”, Yeltsin Center, Yekaterinburg, 24. 03 — 11. 06.
2022 Project “Temporary Solution” together with Nikita Perfilyev.
2019 Rapid Response Group volume 1, Cultural Transit Foundation, Yekaterinburg.
Educational projects, workshops:
2022 Poetic image visualization laboratory for the “Think of Perm” project, PERMM museum, Perm.
2022 Art laboratory for the inclusive project “Sketches” at the Yeltsin Center.
2021 Workshop “Overcoming Corporeality” at the Art Gallery of the Yeltsin Center.
Performing expirience:
2023 Exhibition “Forms of Lived Abstraction” based on the results of the performative laboratory of Svetlana Spirina, Art center “Zarya”, Yekaterinburg.
2021 Performance by Svetlana Spirina “Atonia”, Art gallery of Yeltsin Center, Yekaterinburg.