Anastasia Ryabova works and projects

2010-2013

THE STAR ROAD Total urban installation 2013 Italy, Biella The Star Road is a heroic expedition, which aims to carve out a new route over Biellas urban landscapes. A group of pioneers overcame all kinds of obstacles, and walk through existing concrete/administrative barriers. This new street will be inspired by the form of a star. More details: http://vialestella.tumblr.com/

The expedition took about 9 hours

FRESCOES 2012 Kiev During pre-election campaigns the city becomes a field of an obtrusive self-represenation of political competitors. Carrying visual presence in the streets to the point of absurdity, the speckled range of candidates simulates a variety of choice in the same way that the elections per se simulate the opportunity to choose. Meanwhile, all the political activity of a good citizen is supposed to be reduced to their participation in them. This situationcreates a subject whose characteristics are closest to the Ancient Greek notion of idiot: a person who lives in separation from public life and doesnt take part in any forms of state administration. According to the Law of Ukraine On the Elections of Ukraines National Deputies, it is only on the day of silence that the citizen has the right to realize their political preferences free from propaganda influence. Prior to that day you can become a legal activist helping to clean the city from the visual propaganda. The politics of legitimation of visual images in the public space (that are outside the law just for one day in the year) highlights the contradictions that are intensified in the reprisal against the images that are illegal all the 365 days. Information about all exhibition: http://www.supostat.org/en/1/otvetstvennyj-za-tirazh

PROBLEM BOOK Publication 2012 The issue is a collection of mathematical tasks, the story of which is based on social, political and economic problems of contemporary cities. Problem Book is to be used as experimental material for social studies classes at schools. The book is the result of cooperation between architects, sociologists and artists: Ivan Brazhkin, Oleksandr Burlaka, Dmytro Vorobyov, Anastasia Ryabova, Maksym Spivakov, Tzuchien Tho, Vladislav Shapovalov. Translation and edition: Dmitry Potemkin. The project was realized within The Way of Enthusiasts exhibition (parallel project of the 13th International Architecture Biennale in Venice). Download russian, english and italian versions: http://www.supostat.org/en/projects/zadachnik

NEW WORLD ORDER Documantation of action 2012 (Vienna) I hung new signs above official plates regulatory or prohibiting something in the city. The new plates have replaced the old ones. It looks like infantile mockery of strict standards and taboos prevalent in western Europe. Among the institutions that have been exposed to the irony was the magistrate, labor exchange, stock exchange, ministry of finance, currency exchangers, bio shops, the biggest shopping center in Vienna, museums, churches and other buildings.

TRILLIONS 2012 Cardboard, acrylic enamel, marker

http://www.flsclcltnsprsdm.cc

Slogans on walls and fences rarely make economic demands. Anastasia Ryabovas graphic series Trillions, imitating the aesthetics of street vandalism (marker pen on cheap plywood), becomes a metaphor for such slogans as well as testimony to their absence. The artist draws astronomical figures with a tired hand, reducing their value to abstraction. Inspired by the 2008 economic crisis, this series also recalls the 1998 default in Russia and the dizzying inflation of the nineties an era when your monthly salary wouldnt fit in two bags, but would buy the same two bags of groceries and nothing more. Multiplied beyond meaning, the zeros in Ryabovas Trillions turn into indistinct swirls and squiggles eliciting nothing but bewilderment. Can mathematics be spoken of in the language of aesthetics? In her attempts to feel what she calls the plasticity of the crisis, Ryabova reduces numbers to a state of primitive (or revolutionary) pre-digital chaos. And chaos is of course pregnant with possibilities. Exactly what possibilities cant be discerned in the works. The charge that the artist levels against the current economic order also remains abstract. The basic question posed in these works is: how effective is the strategy of declarative protest? Is this the laziness of an artist who cant be bothered to delve seriously into all the intricacies of the economic system, to offer a reasoned critique and conceive an alternative? Or a principled refusal to address the enemy in his own language? Could it be that to answer economics in the language of aesthetics is just such an irrational, but strategically effective, hysterical gesture? Olga Jitlina

ATTENTIONWHORES 2011 Two channel video installation (preview http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwlYi16Vf68&feature=youtu.be ) Long live the solidarity of the leaky, rotten, wicked, scabby and stinky! lexandr Brener Attentionwhores are multitudes of rivals competing for our attention. Every element in the enormous pile of rubbish strives to become even if for a very short time the most important one. Every movement aspires to become regular. Every event must be omprehended. Multitudes of nonentities forced to the periphery of our attention, rotting beyond the upto-date problematics, need the artists help to actualize their potential. Is the absence of the right to speak up synonymic to the lack of attention? Casual objects captured on the video are unexpectedly granted with a say. The sounds of their voices are random, alarming and well-aimed, with a Hitchcock-like obtrusiveness. But here what is enveloped withmystery are not Hitchcocks meaningful details, which his movies storylines are constructed on, but different kinds of insignificant elements superfluous for a casual glance.

UNTITLED 2011 Series of Photos based on action in urban environment City flag-stoles are functional objects created in order to represent the symbols of power. On a street flag-pole you would barely see an oppositional banner, as well as any other symbol not mentioned in a calendar of official dates and not suitable for showing via regional media-networks, prefectures and municipality. Fruits and vegetables on a flag-pole is more than just it is. This is poetic challenge to ideology on its symbolic territory, and a nave gesture of street transgression, and a reflexion on a possibility to express artistically in a political space.

NORTH BY NORTHWEST 2011 Photo series of triptychs Title of this triptych is famous phrase. It was fixed in the culture thanks to Alfred Hitchcock . Today North by Northwest means irrational, strange action. For example I clean my teeth with excessive, absurd construction from the toothbrush, pliers, scissors, telescopic broom, lighters, bicycle pump, etc. Hand that triggers the movement of this construction located outside. The mechanism is extended to the entrance. There is an artist who performs hygienic procedure in the bathroom.

HIGH TENSION ART Electrical Tape on canvas 2011

WHERE IS YOUR FLAG, DUDE? installation, flag brackets 2011

Where is the essence of this nowadays dismay? Is it in stating the postideological character of modernity, which finds its expression in the ranks of all banners and flags? Equal among equals, deprived of content, form, historical sense. For example, the sea of national symbols welcoming the participants of the political and economic summits. Or in megalomania project of the largest flagpole in the world, worthy of inclusion in the Guinness Book of Records? Or is it inside the sluggish street decoration of big cities hundreds of brackets for the flags along roads and on the walls, brimming with symbols in the rhythm of official state calendar dates? When does this mess become a drama? In the situation when all parties agreed that it can no longer continue, there is no such thing as an epoch after ideology, we do need new flags and banners. In a situation where demand for change is formulated and accepted by all stakeholders debate. But no change is happening. Over and over again there is this hysterical demand for change and the articulation of its urgent need. But nothing happens. It thickens the critical mass under the weight of which the very grounds of the request are deformed. Form, which can give the desired content, is twisted in an abstract prettiness, mutated into monstrous spider crawling along the wall or simply turns into a clothes hanger. Where is your banner, dude? It is able to fix this whole nasty mess off? Or let it writhe on all these structures are not wanted anymore. Can we always find where to stick our flag?

ARTISTS PRIVATE COLLECTIONS 2010 web-archive Artists Private Collections is a web project that rediscovers, in a completely new and original way, the internal mechanisms of the artist community, virtually recreating the relational and exchange bonds that exist inside it. The website looks like a dynamic museum and gives us a glimpse of the world of artists, as well as the possibility to show works that in some cases have never been exhibited before, because they have not entered the art market or the circle of millionaire collectors, and whose importance lies not in their intrinsic economic value, but in the web of relationships they express. The work was conceived as an open, long-term program, involving a potentially infinite, worldwide expansion of the virtual artist community. Artists Private Collections is utopia implemented in the virtual space. Desired by many authors, the art autonomy from the market, curators and other intermediaries between the artist, the work and the spectator find its place in the social network of informal relations between artists, where the bridge is a work of art. Critical pathos of the project is not confined to a denial of determinate mode of existence of the art world, but offers a positive alternative to tying a strictly private space with artists studios as a public Internet space. Artists Private Collections is the research, where the artist becomes a contemporary art institution, without losing anything inherent in him as an author, but acquiring the new degree of the institutional freedom. Artists Private Collections is the archive, which creates its own community, and at the same time, it is a community that is implemented in the archive. As such, the project has no material body. Mechanism inherent in the base of the project and its form-building principle is a work of art. This system concentrates the interrelated forces, transforming them into interdependent, while focusing on the work of art. Each new attempt of the physical representation of the project allows to fix the interim results of a study where the researcher and his material are the artists and their works.

This photographes show installation represented Artists Private Collections on the exhibition. Each group of photos on the walls is artists collection. All collections connected by color lines. This lines indicate one artist s occurrence in collection of another artist. Installation represents structure of realationships between artworks author and artworks owners. There are computers in the center of the room where you can see details of the project by visiting the website artistsprivatecollections.org.

ARTISTS PRIVATE COLLECTIONS

BLOWING AS TRIANGLE, 2010 Air blows through the form of built-in stencil wall objects: triangle, circle, square. To form the air is almost impossible. The objects are situated on the border between charlatanism and the strange nature of art. The audience can only feel forms. Un-perceive art gives rise to thinner aspiration. 30 30 30 m Electropump, metallic grid, stencil, plywood

CARS UNDER SNOW 2010 acrylic on cardboard