“(inside)out”, personal exhibition in the Center of the City Culture, Perm, Russia, 2019
The exhibition of the young Yekaterinburg artist Ksenia Markelova is being held at the City Culture Center as part of the We-Fest 2019 festival, which this year is dedicated to body issues and bodily changes. Often, when talking about the exploration of physicality, artists actually reduce this topic to the study of sexuality, the connection between the mental and physiological, or self-reflection.
Ksenia Markelova takes the exploration of the physical to a completely different plane — to the one in which she should be, to a purely existential plane, free from gender, social, ethical and aesthetic clichés. The body appears before us in all possible dimensions — from an object of the finest poetic study to a brutal conglomerate of flesh, so the objects presented at the exhibition do not just suggest thoughts of diametrically opposed feelings (from horror to desire) — they give rise to these feelings.
Speaking about her works, Markelova recalls the term “proprioception” or “kinesthesia” — this is the sense of the position of parts of one’s own body relative to each other and in space. But in this case we are talking more about the position of body parts in relation to one’s own “I”, about an attempt to separate these categories and disassemble them into layers with the care of a surgeon and the attention of an artist. The process of finding (or losing) oneself inside and outside one’s own body is emphatically procedural — it is always a story about, formation, metamorphosis and transformation. During these explorations, the artist poses a specific question: “To what extent does the body distance itself from us — those living inside it — due to the perception of itself as owner, tenant, passenger or user?”
Working with the physical is possible in many dimensions — for example, if you ground it in the social context of the festival, then in this case a field will open up for discussion about the norm and non-norm, about the acceptance or rejection of the physiological. But before we delve into specifics, we will have to deal with fundamental issues, with alienation from one’s own materiality, with the attitude towards the body as an Other — such an outside view can lead to unexpected results: from total acceptance of oneself to the disturbing exposure of vulnerabilities associated with by correlating one’s own feeling of the body with the feeling with which the forms created by Markelova “live”, regardless of the viewer’s perception. One way or another, the exhibition invites the viewer to carry out serious reflective work and ultimately look at his body and his “I” with different eyes, overcoming alienation from himself.
