Masha Shubina’s solo show We’ll See continues and expands the artist’s reflections on the fragility of the material world and her own identity amid the challenges of wartime. Four years ago, in the summer of 2022, Shubina became the first artist to have a solo show at The Naked Room after the full-scale invasion began. In Lost & Found Material, she searched for a way to speak about the experience of a world falling apart through everyday objects.
Today, when war has become as commonplace as breakfast, Masha’s work has returned to its familiar scale: large-format self-portraits, achingly beautiful to look at. But while this exercise in self-identification within patriarchal capitalism was once a wry nod to gender politics, the glossy surfaces of these painted selfies now radiate a sense of fear and even menace. War, as we know, is commodified just as readily as women are, and therefore finds its place all too easily within Shubina’s glamorised imagery.
"To understand Masha Shubina’s artistic method, it helps to enter one of the spaces she has created—a studio, a flat, or a country house. It is there that her relationship with the world of things reveals itself most fully: all those curtains, little vases, napkins, forks, slippers and even washing-up sponges, through their deliberate presence, are transformed from everyday objects into elements of a vast Gesamtkunstwerk, where function gives way to form. Being inside it, we seem to inhabit two modes at once—the profane, where a black glossy plate can be wiped with a red waffle-weave towel, and the aesthetic, where colour, texture, scale and composition prevail. It is precisely this flickering between the two modes that allows Masha to speak about the social and the political while remaining within the world of the everyday, the domestic and the beautiful—a world reserved for the woman and the artist," adds Maria Lanko.
"The title of the exhibition refers to a state of uncertainty that allows decisions to be postponed and responsibility to be partially set aside: we’ll see how things unfold. The phrase feels equally familiar in private life and in the world’s responses to the war, where expressions of concern often stand in for action.
Echoes of wartime also appear in the materials and imagery of my new works. Some of them were based on emergency evacuation plans from Emirates, Air Arabia and other Middle Eastern airlines, after flights began to be cancelled in the spring amid another escalation of the war in the region. Other works, featuring images of nuclear power plants printed on fabric, emerged in response to Russian attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. Through these glamorous yet slightly unsettling images, I speak about the way war seeps into everyday life, while the sense of safety is increasingly eroded by nuclear and energy terror, as well as by the global redistribution of attention and resources," adds Masha Shubina.
We would like to thank our partners at Kiss My Apps for supporting the reconstruction of the gallery’s new space.
