TANYA CHERNOMORDOVA
MURAV'INAYA SKHVATKA (ANT FIGHT)
(Russia, Saint Petersburg)
This project is an interactive journey through the courtyards of 21 Bolshaya Zelenina Street. Household waste, elements and artifacts from the building, and forgotten items have all been lovingly collected and transformed into little hints pointing towards a treasure. The treasure is whatever the spirit of the courtyard shares with you to satisfy your prying desire to unravel its mysteries. The works will be placed in an interactive map (in the form of a Telegram bot) that will allow any viewer to star in this adventure.
Tanya Chernomordova’s work draws on graphic arts – understood as commercial, applied design in a historical context – especially through analyzing archival illustrations, posters, cards, and magazines. Her drawing practice is based on deconstructing the usual forms of drawing, recomposing, and tracing canonical forms and patterns as a kind of printmaking. Mixing antiquity, mythical heroes, Renaissance traditions, medieval illustration, stills from Soviet movies, portraits of working women in marginalized industries, photos from private family archives, animation, and military symbology, she interrogates our concepts of “beauty” and “the ideal” and the procedures by which they are formed, as well as questioning the structures of memory and the archive as such. In addition, she works in painting and sculpture, incorporating everyday objects and installations. Chernomordova’s areas of interest include personal mythologies (the fluid nature of authorship), fairy tales, folklore, death studies, art brut, media culture, communication as a game, ideological phenomena, issues of metageography, contemporary poetry, and more. Tanya Chernomordova graduated from the Repin Academic Institute of Fine Arts and is currently studying at the Rodchenko Art School in Moscow under Sergey Bratkov. She is a co-founder of the exhibition space Kunsthalle nummer sieben.