For Warsaw Gallery Weekend The Naked Room presents a selection of Anna Zvyagintseva's works in various media from the past 12 years that reveal her practice in all its complexity and integrity.
The series Misplaced Touches (2017), the remarkable Sustainable Costume for an Invader (2022), the artwork To Plant a Stick (2019-2022), Anna’s objects-vases (2019), Found Drawings (2018), the video installation entitled Synchronization (2011), and the three-channel video Declaration of Intent and Doubt (2019)—all these to be displayed at the fair.
The Misplaced Touches series is based on an attempt to capture something that can't be seen, physically embodied, in this case—a touch. In her works, the artist often makes visible the impalpable facets of our lives, showcasing their fragility and documenting intangible moments.
Misplaced Touches are plaster sculptures that appeal to imperceptible touches in public and private life, from maternal to civic, discovered on social media. These ostensibly abstract works document and highlight elusive but physically lingering touches that exist on the plain of sensuous experience.
For her most recent work Sustainable Costume for an Invader Anna Zvyagintseva has chosen a deliberately fragile form, elusive just like traces of water in the film. Yet, through it she made a merciless and explicit statement on the ongoing violence in her homeland. Anna brings viewer’s attention to an idea of physical destruction as an unavoidable finale for those provoking war and death. Helpless behind his weapons and brutal power, an invader of a land he does not belong to remains just as vulnerable as any other unarmed biological creature inhabiting invaded soil. Ashes to ashes.
Anna’s recent work To Plant a Stick (2019—2022) addresses the topics of collective memory and oblivion and hope for the future, where life will find its path, nourished by care and love.
Unlike other pieces at the stand Anna’s objects-vases appear to be stunningly material. However, the brutality of the execution borders with its sensuality. For these fireclay objects as much as for the paintings with their imaginable inner space, it is the in-between that matters. Interior emptiness of the vase determines and “assembles” its shape, as well as detects the space between people, corporeal participation of which is the key condition for the creation of such a vase.
In Declaration of Intent and Doubt, the artist questions the unprotected state of intimacy of the very process of art making. Here, the viewer is invited to zoom out and take a closer look at acts of thinking, creating, unveiling. We see a moment of labour, plain but graceful, performed by a female heroine. Her movements, as well as fleeting results of her actions, are intrusively highlighted by a bold beam led by another protagonist, almost invisible in shadows. The work opens up a discussion on power, responsibility, and resistance of artists’ labour.
Marszałkowska 34/50
00-651 Warszawa, Poland
