RUINART ART PATRONAT WINNER IS MARIA AGUREEVA

The project is implemented as part of the Ruinart Art Patronat grant programme with the support of Cosmoscow Foundation.

At Cosmoscow 2019, Maria Agureeva, winner of this year’s Ruinart Art Patronat grant, presents her work “Passing” (2019) made at the intersection of different art forms: installation, performance and its video documentation, musical piece.“Passing”is an artistic description of how a person perceives their own body, its conflicting images, traces and prints, its feelings and affects.Round-shaped pink objects with a soft and neat contour in the artist’s hands are casts from various parts of her body made of quickly hardening plastic. These casts are symbols of the body as it is. They are being “corrected”, improved, and brought into line with generally accepted ideas about the ideal figure. To make casts (that is to say, the body) more perfect, the artist predictably destroys them grinding into a fraction and depriving them of any original connection with of reference to the human body. 

Agureeva's work is an alarming warning to the world in which the desire to aesthetize one’s own body and strictly follow the imaginary ideal of a public image results in the disappearance of a person. The obligation to be oneself and expose oneself leads to the fact that this oneself simply seizes to exist. “All go to one place. All are from the dust, and to dust all return.” 

Alexey Maslyaev