Gifts. Play Modules. Series °1-9
metal, paint
circa 25 cm
2014
Commission for the exhibition Beauty of Disgraceful, Belyaevo Art Center, Moscow (2014)
curated by Andrey Erofeev
series of 9 structures : metal, paint, around 20 x 35 cm each
research of Moscow yellow-n-green urban fences based on the postcards series
« Driven by the decision of the municipal authorities, the zabors (“fences”, in Russian) proliferate in the residential areas from Moscow. A distorted enclosure protects the grass trampled underfoot; each parcel of land is now surrounded. The making of these zabors is quite simple : it needs to weld tubes, line pipe, metal bars on the quick lane, and roughly paint them […] Nevertheless, all of this is not that rudimentary. The zabor is indeed one of the historical foundations of the Russian urbanism. Moscow is a City-Fortress and the Kremlin wall is a “zabor” as well.
Zabor articulates not only the necessity to appropriate, to fix and to defend the immense space of Russian territory, but also the political reality where the state controls a hierarchal space, as well as the inward-looking attitudes and the protection, often paranoid, of properties […] Katya Ev establishes and documents a whole typology of the zabors. More than 300 photographies reveal both the diversity and the absurdity of the phenomenon in question. Afterwards she constructs mockups of Moscovite fences, play modules, for which real zabors are taken as prototypes. Once the transition from the zabor to the toy is accomplished, she reformats these initially distorted structures anticipating their future degradation. The easily handled toy deprives the fence from its repressive function. I, I play ».
text by Hannah Kreile, I, I Play, cat. Here we are. Views of artists on anthropocene, 2016.
Publications:
cat. Là où nous sommes. Regards d’artistes sur l’anthropocène, Paris, France (2016)
cat. Beauty of disgraceful, Art Center Belyaevo, Moscow (2014)
Moscow 24, "Beauty of disgraceful", TV broadcasting (2014)
Exhibitions:
Orangerie, Het Paviljoen - KASK Curatorial Studies, Ghent (Be), 2021
Architectures Intérieures, Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture Val-de-Seine, Paris (Fr), 2019
Correspondances / Vasistas / Le regard à travers la fenêtre / Il se passe quelque chose entre nous, Galerie Mansart, Paris (Fr), 2017
Là où nous sommes. Regards d’artistes sur l’anthropocène, espace Jussieu, Paris (Fr), 2016
Beauty of disgraceful, Art Center Belyaevo, Moscow (Ru), 2014
