Portfolio Anna Škodenko
Within my art practice I try to create a “trap” for the viewer. In order to build this up, I absorb and process all types of things in relation to the problem I explore until they will both fulfil and exhaust each other, letting something other to emerge. I always aim to reach the point where there will be the only one possible pathway to proceed, which would lead me again through all the questions and problems I was initially thinking of. The subjects of the works vary from social problematics and dilemmas(Idealistic), art-specific or institutional questions(Untitled [Thanks to H.C.Andersen…], Feedback Loop ) and finally, to questions of liminal sensory perception of a human being (Prisoner’s Cinema, [Field] Which is Nearly Pure). However, this categorisation of the works by subjects is not the not exactly accurate. Nor from the perspective of interrelation between them neither from motives and impulses standing behind creation of the work. There is always something which stays beyond any of the directly articulable topics and both prevents and provokes for expansion and exhaustion for the same time. It is a longing for a kind of liminal situation; where is clearly nothing left to say and also nothing can come after, but you are still making choices and keep on moving.
CV ANNA SHKODENKO b. 1986, Tallinn Lives and works in Tallinn, Estonia & Glasgow, UK a48612220285@gmail.com +3756045119 Education: 2016 - 2107 2009 - 2010 2005 - 2009 2007 - 2008
Mlitt in Fine Art Practice (Painting), Glasgow School of Art Institute of Contemporary Art in Moscow BA painting, Estonian Academy of Arts BA Fine Arts, Chelsea College of Art and Design (Erasmus program)
Solo exhibitions: 2016 [field] which is nearly pure, Hobusepea Gallery, Tallinn, Estonia 2013 Situation of Artistic Discussion II, Berliin, OKK gallery, with K. Tulin 2011 Situation of Artistic Discussion, Tartu mnt 1(academy waste ground) with K.Tulin 2009 Idealistic. Draakoni Gallery, Tallinn 2008 48612220285: there is no you there is only me. Tallinn City Gallery Selected group exhibitions: 2017 – An exhibition, Victoria Halls, Helensburgh – PERMANENT VACATION, The Old Hairdressers, Glasgow – Somewhere Far from the Subject itself, ART PARK Glasgow at House for an Art Lover 2016 – EXTENSION.EE. Reflection: look inside/from within. Vol III. Triumph Gallery, Moscow – Silence, Darkness. Curator Anneli Porri, Tallinn Art Hall – The Great Painter. Curator Liisa Kaljula. Evald Okase Museum, Haapsalu. – Rauma Biennale Balticum 2016 - Vulnerability, Rauma Art Museum, Finland
2011 – If it’s Part Broke, Half Fix it, Contemporary Art Centre (CAC), Vilnius 2010 – Illusion of Inclusion. Gallery Vartai, Vilnius – Blue-Collar Blues, Tallinn Art Hall 2009 – Triin Tamm solo exhibition, OUI Centre of Art, Grenoble – Alternative Nation: Young Estonian Art From Estonia, RMIT School of Art, Melbourne. Curators M. Juur, Dr Phil Edwards – Art Center for Dismissed Employees. Tallinn post office. 2008 – Doings or Not, City Museum of Ljubljana, Vzigaliza Gallery, Ljubljana, Slovenia. Curators M.Säde, L.Kuusk – 7 rasons, 1 show, Hobusepea Gallery, Tallinn 2007 – Marinistide klubi,14th Tallinn Print Triennial. Curators Martin Rünk, Jaanus Samma – Chelsea Open, Triangle Project Space, London – Hip-op-dont-stop, Nolias Gallery, London. Curator Alan Jones
2015 – DOings & kNOTs. Tallinn Art Hall. Curator Margit Säde-Lehni – Baltic House Lab, Centre St. John, Gdansk
Residencies, scholarships, awards: 2017 Edward Wiiralt Scholarship Konrad Mäe prize nominee Köler prize nominee Dumfries House Residency, East Ayrshire, Scotland
2014 – Can’t go on, Must go on, Tallinn Art Hall
2013 radi0.tv Residency: “Broadcasting offline”, top e.V. Berlin
WORKS Untitled [Thanks to H.C.Andersen...]
an Installation of couple of stories and something in-between. 2017, Glasgow Once upon a time I was working in my studio at the Glasgow School of Art, where I was making my degree in Fine Art Practice. The walls were covered with single words connected or separated by shiny silver pieces of cardboard. For weeks I was cutting and gluing these tiles for no particular reason but some bizarre necessity that the studio itself has imposed on me. The studio was a boxlike space separated from the rest of the students by four thin walls. The school felt to be a rather an enterprise, praising individuation and curious, innovative products which should perfectly fit into the art market. This situation reminded me of little Kay from Hans Christian Andersen’s “Snow Queen”. The kidnapped boy was sitting for days in the frigid Snow Queen’s halls and shifting pieces of ice, trying to fit them into every possible pattern. To him the patterns were of the utmost importance, for the chip of glass in his eye made him see them that way. He arranged his pieces to spell out words; but he could never find the way to make the one word he was so eager to form. The word was “Eternity.” On my palette there were three main “substances” which I used for outlining the project: The situation of the school (intellectual, social and spacial properties ruling over the institution); The narrative of the fairy tale (mainly the metaphor of imposed distortion of perception and sense-making mechanisms) and my actual studio, which worked both as an instrument and a witness of my creative process at the time. All the elements of the installation deal with framed, limited field of vision and all the sounds used in it are the outcome of my interaction with the studio. I recorded and then transformed the noises of this physical space into a virtual musical instrument operatable by a Midi keyboard.
The mirror ball-box piece is based on the first chapter of “The Snow Queen� telling the story of invention of the mirror by an evil master of a school, of transformation of reality via reflection and of the final shattering of the mirror into countless trouble-making fragments. The work consists of a tripod dolly, a box, mirror ball and a song made solely with the sounds of the wire ropes in my studio juxtaposed with the lyrics of the story.
CLICK HERE FOR THE VIDEO
The second box titled “Reternity” tells the story of Kay and his eternal search for reason in tiles of ice. Apart from links to the problem with reflections and the studio reality, it introduces the game of Tetris into the play. Conceptual, neuropsychological and cultural meanings of it in a way work as a tile which I was missing in order to put together mine impossible but long-sought-after Word. The work consists of looped Tetris screen recordings and a tune based on the original Tetris theme - “Korobeiniki” (a nineteenth-century Russian folk song). The sounds recorded at my studio served here as musical instruments to perform the melody. The video and the sound are separated from a viewer by a frame with a word “Reternity” cut through it. CLICK HERE FOR THE VIDEO
The third part of the installation is a single standing wall with peeping holes and periscopes connected to them. The periscopes are pointing at snapshots of my actual Glasgwegian studio.
[field] which is nearly pure
Hobusepea Galelery, Tallinn. 2016 6 paintings (910 x 610 mm to 2010 x 1220 mm), chalk on blackbaord and a labyrinth These “paintings” depict inverted snow landscapes, which have traces of different type of human interruption on them. These images are executed on standard school/office chalkboards: the ones which are supposed to be used again and again — being coated by chalk lines and easily cleaned out of them. Here snow ‘s vulnerability (and generally vulnerability of any state of mind/things/etc) meets with a media, which was designed to be temporary and erasable from the very beginning. The paintings being exhibited in the galley were not fixed or protected in any way. On the contrary, on some of them chalk sticks were left, suggesting that a viewer can interrupt the image. Which finally occurred to on of the images. In order to make a viewer’s interruption inevitable, two additional gestures were made. The gallery floor was cowered with black fabrics and white chalk powder was spread under the pictures. If approaching a painting, a viewer would leave his/her footprints on the floor. And secondly, bubble wrap cellophane was placed underneath the black fabrics, so that every single step of a visitor would produce a cracking sound of squeezed bubbles.
The basement floor of the gallery was filled with a labyrinth-like structure made of wire ropes and thin semi-transparent white and black geo-textile. The “labyrinth” included no images, but Robert Frost’s “Fire and Ice” poem hand-written with black chalk on one of the walls of the space. The “labyrinth” had one dead-end and of design of a maze having separate exit and entrance pathways.
Prisoner’s Cinema
12 small(approx. 10 x 16 cm ) oil on aluminium paintings; installation. “Can’t Go on, Must Go on”, Tallinn Art Hall, 2014 12 oil on aluminium paintings depict snowscapes and different types of snowy surfaces turned into a negative — where the falling and dispersion of light and shadow can be seen and observed in the most clear and direct way. 12 images, 12 surfaces of deformation freezed in grey: gentle textures as if left by a thumb of someone who tried to palpate through these the surfaces unbelieving one’s eyes. Within this body of work I focused on the questions which I considered basic in a field of the visual: on one hand light and shadow as a kind of minimum what can be perceived with the eyes, and on the other – the primary experience of seeing: the question whether there will be anything visible left if even the minimal amount of light and shadow interplay is absent, and there is no visual information coming from the outside. „Prisoner’s cinema“ is a phenomenon experienced by those who spend prolonged amounts of time in the dark, deprived of visual stimuli (prisoners, miners, Antarctic explorers etc). The “Cinema” refers to the series of images that the mind creates, often emotionally intense or terrifying. Prisoner’s Cinema is a result of psychological effects of prolonged exposure to darkness combined with the phosphenes, an entoptic phenomenon of light being seen without light actually entering the eyes. One day I realised that images of snow remind me of this kind of closed-eyes experience and of objects perceived as a result. Later I discovered that the negatives of snow photographs are even closer to that experience. If one looks at the snow in the bright light, nothing would be seen except the light. It was exactly the case when I took the photographs for my paintings: seeing next to nothing and intuitively choosing the location and composition. The negatives of my photographs seemed to transform the indistinguishable visible and evenly illuminated: as if the camera had sensed the limits of the sight. In order to expose these paintings, I had build a tunnel-like darkened corridor where spot lit paintings could be viewed in a narrow space, one by one, forcing a visitor to sit precisely in-front of each painting. I chose the distance of 45-75 cm („personal distance“ according to E.T. Hall’s classification) to look at the pantings. This distance is characterised by possibility of touching one’s partner, a minimal visual distortion and possibility to perceive a three-dimensional form. The size of paintings is thus connected to the size of either upper or lower part of human face (10 x 16 cm) which ideally fits into the 15-degree visual angle of “personal distance”.
Idealistic
2008-2016. Six oil paintings on plexiglass, 1 x 2 m each In order to explore, explain and decode the situation I felt I was living at the moment, where there were neither clear conception nor perception of the time, space, society, future or past, I focused on the articulation and “proclamation” of a kind of adapted to the current situation version of Thomas More vision of a perfect society. The images executed on glossy and perfect for some time plexiglass. Their visual language is borrowed both from modern lifestyle magazines and Soviet propaganda paintings serve here to manifest different aspects of utopian society. As a model for a human being in this series I used multiplied self-portraits and views of one of the modern and fast developing areas in Tallinn. Each painting accompanied by a quote from T.More “Utopia”.
Active Vocabulary <—> Passive Constructor
mp4, one thousand nine hundred and seventy seven free standing pronounced words, installation. ~ 30’. 2015 “DOings & kNOTs” , Tallinn Art Hall. Curator Margit Säde. 2015 The work commissioned for “DOings & kNOTs” exhibition. The point of departure for “DOings & kNOTs” is the “do it” project — the “longest-running and most far-reaching exhibition to ever take place” — initiated by Hans Ulrich Obrist in 1993, and which was on display at the Tallinn Art Hall in 1997. “DOings & kNOTs”, which was initially planned to be about instructions in art, became more about the impossibility of following instructions, rules or a given formula. “Active vocabulary <—> passive constructor” was intended to be an instruction-portrait of Hans Ulrich Obrist. For this purpose I created an alphabetical looped archive of the words H.U.Obrist regularly uses while talking to the audience. Two audio recordings: one interview and one public talk (“Ted x Marrakesh: Hans Ulrich Obrist, The Art of Curating,” 2011 and “ Hans Ulrich Obrist, Morning Ritual by Linda Brownlee” ) were cut into words and words placed one after another in an alphabetical order. Resulting sound piece was mounted into a sound-proof box wherein a viewer could sit and submerge to the structured verbature of H.U.O
“ACTIVE VOCABULARY <—> PASSIVE CONSTRUCTOR” AUDIO FILE
Feedback Loop (The tragedy of an independent Feedback Loop) video. 6’15’’ looped. 2009
“Feedback Loop” is a video which came as a result of a research on a web 2.0 theory and social outputs of it. The work is rooted in a manifestation of narcissistic socialisation, egocentric networked consciousness, self-determinating individuality — all these ridiculous consequences to the prioritisation of the self in the field of “individualised society”. The structure of the work is thus built on the logic of never-ending necessity of a feedback. “Feedback Loop” is usually shown on a monitor, while the viewer is let alone with the video of these art critics talking about the problems of the work. As far as a viewer is not familiar with the original context of the video, usually he/she places himself on a place of this discussed and non-present artwork and confuses the words said about this work with the words that could be said about him- or herself. featuring: Dave Beech Giorgio Sadotti Hayley Newman
CLICK HERE TO SEE THE VIDEO