Installation | 2017

My Scarlet Birthplace

In this work I use carded wool, prepared to become felt, a material traditional for houses, in a random historical, native and simultaneously, alien culture in which I grew up (Kazakhstan). In 1998, I immigrated to Russia having enrolled in the University, 6 years later I moved to Moscow.

This work is about the isolation and exclusion inherent in emigrants, equally double-edged in the new homeland, and the old one, about cultural disorientationand recoding related to adaptation, abrasion of national and cultural features, rewriting andformation of a new identity.

For me it is very important that the work was first seen in St. Petersburg, native to mygreat-great-grandparents and the place that became native to me. The letters presented inside the woolen corridor are handwritten letters from the women of my family — my grandmother, my mother, my aunt and my nieces who supported me after the emigration.