Anyuta Wiazemsky

ANYUTA WIAZEMSKY

Anyuta began to work as a freelance photographer (portraits, weddings and event photography) in the year 2008.

She won a first price in the international photography competition “Orange Kingdom”, and her work was rated highly in LensCulture Portrait Awards 2013.

At a certain point she decided to concentrate on arts in general and especially on photography which was the reason to began studying in the Royal Art Academy in Ghent, Belgium, after successfully passing entrance examinations in 2013.

In 2015 she transferred from Photography department to the department of Autonomous Design where she has discovered freedom to use any suitable medium to express herself.

GSM 04 78 66 88 35 e-mail: exe.cutioned@gmail.com

January-February 2014, ‘Orange Kingdom’, photo’s in the photography contest exhibition, Moscow November 2015, ‘Glitter Bending Octopus’, actor in the performance, in collaboration with Sara Manente and Marcos Simoes, Gent April 2016, ‘Mind The Bike’, installation, presented in the festival ‘Mayday Mayday’, Gent April 2016, ‘Bifurcation Point’, installation and performance, presented in the festival ‘Mayday Mayday’, Gent April 2016, ‘Why did I move to Belgium’, installation and performance, presented in the festival ‘Mayday Mayday’, Gent

ANYUTA WIAZEMSKY

ARTISTS STATEMENT

There are some major topics that intrigue me. And there are some social problems I find personally frustrating. What I want to do as an artist is to try solve those problems using the knowledge from my fields of interest.

I strive to know how a human mind works. The theory of perception, the psychiatry and psychology, the social mind and the mind of an individual are among the topics I can speak about for hours. Are people essentially able to understand each other? Is it possible to wear someone else’s shoes? And if one can try these other person’s shoes what will the consequences be?

Generalizations are evil. I like to talk about big problems of society. Yet it’s easier to activate one’s imagination, persuade them when showing a particular example. The more specific example is, the tighter connection is established. I am in a rather weak position in the surrounding world. I live in a foreign country with only a student residence permit. If I don’t find another way to stay where I want to, I’ll have to go back even against my own will. I am a bisexual woman seeing nothing special in sexual intercourse and adding no special value to it therefore, read it as ‘free love’ adherent. I believe every person should have the right to decide what to do with their own life, health and destiny, even if it is a decision to hook up on heroin; as long as this decision doesn’t violate others’ rights and freedoms. I do not like money and would prefer not to be paid if I only had enough food and materials to work with. I am diagnosed with depression and I manage to move on with it while it still means just ‘being sad or tired’ for many others.

There’s no ‘right’ way to make the world a better place.

What I like to think I am doing is making those around me aware of a simple fact that we are all different and it is beautiful this way.

ARTISTS STATEMENT

DECAY

TYPE Photography project DESCRIPTION Why do we go to museums? What do we find there? It is our history. Traces of what our ancestors ever did on Earth. And it does not matter whether it’s an anthropology museum or an art museum but the items stored there are exposed to time and are affected by it. Time leaves its own traces on the museum items and – to put it in other words – on ourselves.

Even concepts do not escape the pressure of time. Some of the art pieces definitely were perceived and – in the first place – created with a different idea in mind than the one we, contemporary observers, have when looking at those.

This project aims at depicting these two aspects of time change, objective and subjective.

REALISATION:

An online publication HTTPS://WWW.LENSCULTURE.COM/PROJECTS/44703-DECAY And a printed postcards set

DECAY

MIND THE BIKE

TYPE Installation

DESCRIPTION I was born in 1989 in Moscow and lived there most of my life.

When I was 5 or 6 years old my father taught me how to ride a bike in a local park near our house.

I hadn’t touched any bike ever since up till the moment I moved to Belgium. In Moscow the distances are too big, public transport links every two possible sites in the city and biking on the road without special lanes is simply life threatening. On the contrary in Belgium, in Ghent it seems to be the best option: it’s faster to ride than to wait for a bus, it is easy to park and lots of roads are specially provided with bikers lanes.

Nonetheless, it is very stressful for me to bike in traffic. I feel that bikes bring danger. For most of the locals biking is as simple as breathing.

I was afraid enough. Then I had a car accident. A car door suddenly opened right in front of me. I made a salto, lost my consciousness for a couple of seconds and got lots of bruises. The worst thing was that I couldn’t get on the bike anymore. But after some time I managed to and it went well. Until I got hit by car, that time for real.

If it had happened a few seconds later I wouldn’t be writing these words now. First weeks after the accident I barely could sleep, took double doses of calming medication and couldn’t get over the concept of fragility. I couldn’t help but replaying the hit in my head over and over again. I remained pedestrian for a few months.

This project was a way to overcome this angst, to reflect on it and to move on. Shit happens but it doesn’t mean that the life doesn’t move on. I wanted this accident to remain the worst thing ever happened to me.

MIND THE BIKE

REALISATION The installation is in a completely dark space. There are 6 photos (3 pictures 50 x 50 cm and 3 pictures 40 x 60 cm) hanged with a fly line inside, not on the walls.

In the 4 corners there are 4 speakers with a 4.0 sound installation with the sounds of street travelling around the visitor.

One corner is partially isolated with a fake wall with a video projection on the outer side of it. Video consists of two ‘layers’.

The top layer is a set of 25 smaller videos mounted in a 5x5 grid, each of them depicts hieratical movement of flash lights.

Time to time some of the smaller videos are ‘switched off’ and then the bottom layer becomes visible. It’s a record of my face while I am replaying the accident and the foregoing moments in my head.

ZEG

TYPE Speaking book DESCRIPTION Have you read ‘One flew over the cuckoo’s nest’? Or ‘The minds of Billy Milligan’? Or ‘Girl, Interrupted’? Have you also been captivated and haunted by thoughts and images? How true are the descriptions of the mental illnesses and institutions? What’s actually the difference between ‘sane’ and ‘insane’? That’s something I was thinking about when I went on the first meeting with the head of cultural department of the Psychiatric Center Dr. Guislain in Ghent to discuss the possibilities of this project.

From the very first moments in the branch for the permanent inhabitants of the Center I realised that these inhabitants before everything else are people, they are individuals with their own characters, sense of humor, joys and sorrows and they are far from being just walking diagnoses. What struck me the most was the atmosphere there. It was very distinct, calm and spacey. It felt like you can be who you are, you have no reasons or audience to show off in front of, you’ll be accepted there and yet any attempt to overcome the distance between any two individuals leads to inevitable failure.

I wanted to create this book to pass on the very atmosphere of the place and to initiate connection between the two worlds.

REALISATION The visual material in the book contains photos (portraits, poetical dreamy images, documentary images), the diary I kept when visiting the Center, a couple of poems written by one of the patients and a program of an Eucharist from the local chapel.

There are audio modules hidden inside the pages with the portraits. The modules are the same as those used in greeting cards. On each module there is a record of the portrayed person telling how they had slept last night.

The name ‘Zeg’ translates as ‘Say’ from Dutch.

ZEG

KIJK!

TYPE Social contact between the psychiatric patients and the people from the outside. Book DESCRIPTION People on both sides of the normality border are actually more alike than different. You might think it’s confronting to speak to a schizophrenic or that they will be dangerous or aggressive or even alien. I won’t talk you around. In Ghent you could have simply come over to the Tuesday morning Kijk!-club I organized in a local Psychiatric center Dr. Guislain. We watched a comedy, ate some fresh pastry and drew together with the patients.

Any time you can just grab the book and flip through it. It is a collection of the drawings made by the patients, by the external guests and by your humble narrator. Could you guess which one is drawn by a ‘sane’ person and which not?

REALISATION The activity provided several possibilities to those attending.

There was fresh home-baked pastry and coffee, a film on a big screen and things necessary for drawing: paper, pencils, markers etc. The event posters with announcements were hung weekly in all the branches of Psychiatric Center Dr. Guislain and posted on Facebook in a few local groups.

Initially I was planning just to collect the drawings made every time, scan them and compile into a book showing that the means of expression so-called ‘healthy’ people are no different from those who are diagnosed with a psychiatric disease.

In the first two sessions there were just a couple of patients appearing but I persisted, organising at again and again, inviting people, hanging new posters. And eventually more and more people from the psychiatric center began to come, so did the external guests. And when someone came from the outside for the first time and began to speak with the patients, the project suddenly became much more valuable to me and to the patients and to those who came as well. It is more about the contact initiated, about reflection on what stigma means. The book with the drawings rather has documentational character.

KIJK!

WHY DID I MOVE TO BELGIUM?

TYPE Installation and performance DESCRIPTION Migration is not only statics, it’s also lives, feelings and fears of many people whose voices are to be heard in this project.

“I was born in a country where I don’t want to live. The country where I do want to live doesn’t want me.”

“The organisations/people who judge you ‘if you are a refugee or not’ are doing a bad job, there’s a lot of disbelief and disinformation. It was really hard for us to prove we were running from the war and our people were being slaughtered.”

“I am too scared and lazy to start the process of emigration even though I’ve been striving to do so for almost all my life.”

“I’ve never regret about this decision.”

“I don’t want to live in a third world country, with no future.”

REALISATION The first stage is a social research: http://hogent.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_0rha8NEpq8qvaPX The participants are asked what are the factors relevant in their opinion on the decision to move a foreign country or to stay in the home country. Then they are asked to order the chosen reasons from the most important to the least important. Then the sociologist I work together with (Vladimir Ponizovsky) counts the ‘weight’ of each factor.

The second stage is the artistic interpretation of the survey results. The factors are categorized into several groups. Each group is associated with a specific place. Then I go to those places, and take some objects from there that I associate with the factors from the survey. Also, I build a great pan scale (about 150 cm high) which represents the decision-making process, one pan stands for pros and the other one for cons. The weight of each object corresponds to the ‘weight’ of each factor

WHY DID I MOVE TO BELGIUM?

The final stage is presentation. I tell my own story and place the objects on the pans. It is somewhere in the terrain of performance and performativity. I create the stage (the objects, the great pan scale) where the survey results are presented. But the text I say is not prepared beforehand and is adapted to the space and public. And the fact that I take some objects speaking about such matters as ‘love’ and ‘business opportunities’ and ‘unwillingness to think about the politics’ and place them on the scale as if it had some special meaning evokes very instant and intense associations within the visitors’ minds. My mission is complete here and it’s up to the audience to decide what they think about the issue.

BIFURCATION POINT

TYPE Installation and performance DESCRIPTION Dark days come and go. They leave traces all over your life. You can surrender and these traces will slowly destroy you. You can try to overcome them and use them to create something new on the ruins instead. Ironically, the dark events remain so important only for you and vanish quickly from the minds of others. You search for sympathy, you are sympathised and yet inevitably lonely, even if you are amid a crowd of very sensible people.

REALISATION The concept was born a year before the actual start of the project when I was put out on the street by my housemate who also was my partner. Back then I just needed to create some distance between myself and the dark reality where this self had no shelter, no food, no money, was about to lose the job, was afraid to be dismissed from the academy and was diagnosed with mild depression. Thoughts about creating such a project became my mental shelter.

A year after I began working on it. I re-read about 5 000 messages we wrote to each other with that housemate and reconstructed the story. The story was then written and recorded.

People of different ages and both genders were invited to take part in a special photo session. They were placed in a certain light setting and the story was played as an audio record. The photographer — me — took pictures of them listening.

Then we met again and I asked the models to tell back what the story was about or what they still remember of it.

The pictures are presented together with the records and the visitors are welcome to investigate the narrative. The performance is an intervention. I address a lover’s monologue to one of the visitors convincing that I am truly and deeply in love with them but even so, I would not expect them to change their life just because they made me love them.

When the intervention is over things go back to normal, the visitors can continue looking at the portraits and listening to the portrayed.

BIFURCATION POINT

graphic design: frutografik