Katya Ev
(ekaterina vasilyeva)

Melanie Weil

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On Katya Ev

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2018

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Through setting up research-based site and time-specific dispositifs (fr. - apparatus), involving performances, processual sculptures or constructed situations, Ekaterina Vasilyeva’s oeuvre attempts for a poetic transformation of the status quo putting in tension political strength and means for liberation. Her focus lays in the issues of power, anonymity, censorship, state regulations, the relation between the individual and the collective, everyday gestures, freedom and control. 

 

Vasilyeva’s performances seek to interrogate our potential of agency as individuals in specific socio-political contexts. She constructs her dispositifs as pluridimensional temporal and spatial whole that gain it strength in their relationship to specific context. Different levels of contextualization combining the gesture, the place, it’s topography and spacial characteristics, and the event as a social ritual interact to subvert symbols of power to create symbolic intensity.

 

A powerful paradox of her artworks resides in how the artist allows the context to then take control back over her own construction and their codes. Her performances, intense processual explorations that engage physicality, repetitive work, long-lasting temporalitities, and put social and political issues in critical perspective are seeking to trigger a reaction but remain fundamentally open. They create interstitial spaces where answer is never articulated, while political empowerment is
engaged through symbolic shifts.