Material: Markers on paper ,print on translucent paper ,original newspapers of 90'
Site specific installation for Devyanostie group show at Cassina Projects, Milan, 2022. Elaborated during the Cassina Studio residency (august - september 2022). Variable size. Could be reproduced for any wall size. Photos by Roberto Marossi. Cortesia della Galleria.
The wall is a visual representation of the old Soviet way of doing repairs, when old newspapers were used to prepare the wall for wallpapering. Artist works with original Soviet and post-Soviet newspapres of 90’. Every journal seen by artist in one hand as a part a collective memory, and in another hand as a part of everyday which influenced the mentality of the nations that have been in the clutches of dictatorship for a long time. Unfortunately, some of them are still in the same sad situation. Referring to childhood memories, the artist repeats the process that she entertained herself as a little girl: «drawing on newspapers» pasted on the wall during repairs, found in old grandmother’s shelves in the absence of new paper. But this time, the infantile gesture of the «child» is an attempt to damage, destroy the narratives of the old propaganda, which, paradoxically, has hardly changed over time. The artist present the personal as political, replacing original photographs in newspapers with photographs of the same period from the personal archive of her family. By deconstruction of what was written, artist try to acquire subjectivity as a common person in the shuffle of history.
The title Lions Liars, Papa! refers us to the personal story of the divorce of the artist’s parents which is in the base of installation narrative. The figure of the father was imprinted in the memory of a joint trip to the circus. «I pulled his sleeve to show him the lions, which impressed me a lot. And he hit me on the arm.» In images with lions, there is always a cage, but it is not clear who is inside it. Lion or circus spectator?
