Artistic, curatorial, pedagogical, publishing, and even just performatively manifest in the everyday plane — women's duets — are politically forming assemblies. Often duet unities develop precisely from the everyday plane of friendly communication, where solidary political interests and deficits are articulated, ways of winning them back, and filling them are fantasized, and new forms and practices are discovered. Despite the different duration of the activity, these projects significantly affected the professional fields and affected the existing balance of forces and topics. In just a few intense years of joint efforts, the California teaching Duet of the early 1970s, Judy Chicago and Miriam Shapiro, institutionalized feminist art in world practice. Important phenomena for the history of women's culture in the post-Soviet Russian context developed in the St. Petersburg 90’s, where Alla Mitrofanova and Irina Aktuganova founded the “Cyber-Femin-Club” — a platform for the latest theoretical and technological practices, artistic experiments. In the same environment, the artistic Duet of Glucklia and Zaplia — “Found Clothes Factory” — immediately developed activity, which became a significant precedent that expanded the values in the art of the ’90s, 00’s, 10’s and still inspires modern generations of post-Soviet artists. Moscow artists of the early 2010s, a curatorial Duet of art historian Nadezhda Plungian and artist Victoria Lomasco, initiated in 2012 “Feminist Pencil” — a large-scale exhibition project that played an important communication role between different generations of post-Soviet artists. Women’s art workshops “Kitchen”, organized in 2015 in Moscow by artists Mikaela and Marina Vinnik, had a similar communicative significance.
Often, entering the professional field itself requires joint efforts — tactical friend assemblies, during the formation period and/or after joint studies, because it is sometimes easier to manifest from the team, being both protected and visible at the same time! In modern Ukrainian art, the Union of artists Anna Shcherbina and Valentina Petrova is active, and what is perhaps important, their meeting took place in 2014 at the course of the pedagogical duet of Katerina Badyanova and Lada Nakonechnaya, which has an undeniably formative influence on the current artistic situation. In the early 2000s, after studying together, Yevgenia Belorusets and Katerina Mishchenko began to act, as well as artists Zhanna Kadyrova and Ksenia Gnilitskaya, who now act independently, took joint steps. The curatorial Duet of Lizaveta Herman and Maria Lanko has been active since their studies at the National Academy of Visual Arts and Architecture. In the history of the Ukrainian art of the ’90s, male art communities (Parcommune, Kharkiv school of photography, etc.) overwhelmingly predominate, and the word ‘girlfriend’ was used as an addition to a male figure — that is, rather an artist's girlfriend than a girlfriends-artists. However, there is information about one joint work of two artists of the Parcommune circle, Natalia Radovinskaia and Victoria Parkhomenko, “Who can knit” (1992) — an ironic installation about how to knit and wear hats correctly, but, unfortunately, history also reports that soon both artists left art, presumably in search of a stable income. It is also known that many professional artists-wives/girlfriends of artists of the '90s (as evidenced by research texts and texts of everyday complaints), left art for the sake of family support in favor of classes that were commercially relevant at that time, applied (Conservation and restoration of cultural heritage), decorative (batik, Floral design, etc.) arts, as well as pedagogical work (art schools, children's art homes).
Objet Trouvé!!