‘Tailoring politics into performative acts’

As a part of research process and preparation for the upcoming performance ‘Debates on Division: When Private Becomes Public’ during PERFORMATIK ‘19 program.

Being brightest and active participants of feminist movement in Russia and internationally, curator Anna Bitkina and artist Gluklya (Natalya Pershina Yakimanskaya) has started their collaborative performative project ‘Debates on Division’ in 2014 after the annexation of Crimea, in a time of radical political turn, that changed position of Russia on the geopolitical arena. Since then ‘Debates on Division’ became a nomadic platform exploring different local contexts (St.-Petersburg, Amsterdam, Washington DC, Oslo), developing and exercising an artistic “language of fragility”. As a part of PERFORMATIK ’19 program the new iteration of ‘Debates on Division’ will take place at BOZAR and will address the questions of love, trust, guilt, suspicion, autonomy and freedom.

During their talk and workshop at BOZAR Gluklya and Anna Bitkina will introduce the practices of Russian female artists and political activists. They will also open up to the public their working process and invite the audience to participate in a collective brain-storming of future performance. In this presentation of an unfinished work and an intimate and open discussion with the audience Gluklya and Anna Bitkina hope to grope the cracks in contemporary society to find a way to heal them with a help of art.  

Gluklya (Natalya Pershina-Yakimanskaya) is a pioneer of performance art in Russia, co-founder of the artist collective The Factory of Found Clothes (FFC) which uses installation, performance, video, text and “social research” to develop the concept of “fragility” and relationship between the internal and external, private and public. Since 2003, Gluklya has been a co-founding member of CHTO DELAT art group. 
Her work has been exhibited in Russia and abroad in group and solo shows, including 56th Venice Biennale, Pratt Institute, NY, MMOMA, Moscow, Gallery Akinci, Amsterdam, MUMOK Vienna among others. Currently she is preparing for the upcoming show about art as activism in Van Abbemuseum, the Netherlands.

Anna Bitkina is an independent curator and a co-founder of the female duo TOK (Creative Association of Curators) in St Petersburg. In her curatorial practice she focuses on local and global implications caused by the accelerated capitalism in post-Soviet territories.
As an invited curator and lecturer she took part in 3rd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, 2nd Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, Manifesta 10 and collaborated with Russian National Centers of Contemporary Art, V-A-C Foundation in Moscow, De Appel in Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam, National Sculpture Factory in Cork, raumlabor in Berlin and CHTO DELAT art collective among others.