Projects

Feminist Translocalities
As part of the Year of Germany in Russia, we created Feminist Translocalities exhibition which already took place in St. Petersburg, Togliatti, Kazan, Chelyabinsk, Irkutsk, Omsk, Perm, Ufa, Novosibirsk. Exhibitions are also planned in Yekaterinburg, Krasnodar, Kaliningrad, Smolensk. In each city, the exhibition is prepared by local curators and local artists take part in it.

How inclusive is our understanding of history? The posters tell us about experiences that have been consistently excluded from the discussions about women in history. Black women and women of color, migrant workers, trans*persons, non-heterosexual women - it's important to see their role in the stories of resistance. Only by understanding the complexity of the past can we think about other scenarios for the future.

Media about the exhibition (in Russian):
VOmske.ru
https://entermedia.io/
razvorot.media
UralPress
taiga.info

Within the framework of Feminist Translocalities, we also presented posters of the exhibition “Leningradski Feminism” (Curators: Olesya Bessmeltseva, Philipp Wenghaus).

Feminism’s
Exhibition at the Museum of Women's and Gender History
August 15 - October 15, 2020

The exhibition "Feminism’s..." consists of several vectors of feminist art and activism. These vectors are associated with internal and external, social and cultural, corporeality and sexuality. We connect different points of view to understand and tell what feminism is.
Speaking about feminism, we start with discussions about what characters there are in different myths and legends, trace the stories of thinking differently, challenging ideals and standards typical of our culture. We show strong voices and a variety of views. We want to show an alternative reality and reinterpret the present in a new way.
We start by rethinking the classic male images of a warrior and a hero and searching for and collecting them into a collage with the question: what is there from a woman in me? What does the dominant cultural discourse promote? Having discussed these topics, we are talking about equality and support, manifesting this in public actions, performances. We show what our grandmothers could do, and what we are doing in the 21st century, inheriting the feminist spirit of suffragettes and feminists who came before us. From comprehending shame and childhood trauma, we come to accepting our identity and sexuality as freedom and independence, since feminism is freedom.
Curators:
Tetiana Isaeva
Tetiana Kornieva
Participants of the exhibition: Nadya Sayapina, Tanya Kapitonova, Tetiana Kornieva, Aliona Mamay, Victoria Guivik, Alina Shevchenko, Polina Makarova, Anastasia Garbuzova, Nadia Babinska Virna, Lesya Pcholka, Yulia Litvinova, Yana Cherevan, Elis Nikolaeva

Vistavka-Chitanka
October 9-28,
space "Wings", st. Lukyanovskaya 69/71

What can be read? What could reading be? The exhibition about reading and for reading presents the statements of the artists intertwined with the text in one way or another.

“Discursiveness is always already material, and materiality is always already discursive” (Karen Barad). Despite the topical questions of theory, in being "always already" there is still some science fiction, but writing, reading and other discursive skills are a practical necessity for symbolic existence in the professional field. But our curatorial ambition is also to master it for fun!

Should an artist trust theory? Test designs in practice? What artistic questions can be used to deal with the gap between theory and practice? How to set up a communication space between professional fields of artists and theoreticians? How to practically root material-discursive approaches in feminist theory and art, "articulating matter and meaning together", and what meaningful role does silence have in them?
Curators:
Ulyana Bychenkova
Anna Shcherbina
Participants of the exhibition: Ulyana Bychenkova, Welcome to the Doll House!, Katerina Lisovenko, Foxes collective, Nastya Teor, Natasha Chichasova, Friedrich Chernyshev, Anna Shcherbina

Queer smuggler's residence in Rakhiv, Belarus
Participants: Anna Lok, Anna Bredova, Nadezhda Sayapina, Daria Churko, Yanis Saar, Alena Aharelysheva, Hanna Filistovich.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the border between Poland and the BSSR was in the town of Rakaw. At that time, in this now small place there were more than a hundred restaurants, shops and nightlife centers. In an artistic form, the context is described in the diary of the smuggler and spy Sergei Pesetsky, a direct participant in all the events in the region in the 1920s. After the book was published in 2016, Belarusian cultural representatives began filming materials about this narrative (an example of the story of male smugglers). All of them are about history, not herstory: women are mentioned in them only in the discourse of “charka, greaves and kabeta”. We (re)create the history of the smugglers in Rakaw during this period through working with archives and imagination. We pursue ideas of sisterhood, co-creation and joint recreation. In implementing the idea, we want to acquaint our other identities and alter-egos, in addition to activist and professional ones - to unite and create a turmoil in our community.

Publications:
Baltic Cocktail
Parisian scarf with the scent of "Red Moscow"

FREE MAPPING
An open digital platform for finding self-organized initiatives and projects and building connections.

Pulsating cartography of the alternative political/social/cultural landscape as a decentralized matrix of self-organized spaces/projects/ intensities. Map of libertarian/ independent initiatives, movements, clusters of interests.

The main goal: to be visible to each other, escaping the centralizing and overcoding apparatuses of power. Open project activity and potentiality of social/cultural transformations.

barzzine.com
music zine-bar
Zine / feast / karaoke / songbook / cookbook is the result of our research, built on horizontal connections and personal sympathies. We turned primarily to girlfriends, girlfriends of girlfriends, acquaintances of girlfriends, to those whose music we love and listen to.

Twelve groups from different cities of Russia and Ukraine told about their experience, shared recipes for their favorite drinks and lyrics of their songs. All these groups work with the topic of women’s or queer rights in one way or another.

Talked with groups: Anna Isakhanyan, Masha Aleksandrova, Nadya Valetskaya, Nadya Rybka (TO “Nadenka”) and Daria Orlova. Design: Alena Saloedova (skooka). Website: Dasha Sh.


femagic.space
Magic Institute of Feminist Research
There are vanishingly few real institutions for gender studies in the post-Soviet space. In the 1990s, the institutionalization of gender studies was in full swing here, but by the 2000s and 2010s, not a trace of many organizations remained. In today's environment, we cannot create a new center for feminist research, but we can imagine it! And build a website for it. Just imagine: an institute where post-Soviet feminist researchers work together! It's definitely magical!

Editor: Daria Yuriychuk. Design: Katya Pyslar. Website: Alisa Kibin. Video: Anna Engelhardt.