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 Biella’s 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
doesn’t take part in any forms of state administration. According to the Law of Ukraine ‛On the Elections of Ukraine’s
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 Ryabova’s 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
wouldn’t fit in two bags, but would buy the same
two bags of groceries and nothing more. Multiplied
beyond meaning, the zeros in Ryabova’s 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 can’t 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 can’t 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 (with Alexey Biuldakov)
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!»
Аlexandr 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
сomprehended.
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 Hitchcock’s meaningful
details, which his movies’ storylines
are constructed on, but different kinds
of insignificant elements superfluous
for a casual glance.
UNTITLED (with Lena Martynova)
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 naпve 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 artist’s 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 х 30 х 30 сm
Electropump, metallic grid, stencil, plywood
CARS UNDER SNOW
2010
acrylic on cardboard