Exploring Voyeurism and Exhibitionism: an Interview with a Student on Our “I Want Into the Art World!” Program – TATIY

I’ve introduced you to TATIY (Tatyana Kozlova) before. She won a #Rosmolodyozh #TavridaGrants grant of 750,000 roubles, which backed her mental-health awareness project about depersonalisation, “Molba” (“Plea”).

She recently held the opening of her solo show, which runs until 14 September. Tanya raises questions of voyeurism and of the monastic disclosure of thoughts as ways of positioning the self in the world. In her work she uses tactile imperatives pulling in different directions, foregrounding the objecthood of the world in response to bodily experience.

She spent a year building a career, doing research and showing at international exhibitions and festivals — and ended up with a commission from a hospital in France to decorate its psychiatric ward.

Tell us about your background in art.

At judo I flew into the gap between the mats and landed head-first on concrete. Then, in hospital, I started drawing. A classic origin story.

How did you move from painting to installation?

My first degree is in architecture, so the idea of the small form was in me even before I had a professional approach to canvas.

How did you find your subject?

I made peace with the very thing I’d been running from. I went deep into pathology and otherness, holy folly, voyeurism, the position of the observer and the researcher.

Was the grant hard to get?

I’m putting together material on exactly that for a lecture I’m giving on 8 September at “Molba”. The lecture is about raising funding and other resources for cultural projects. I’ll share my own experience and my mistakes, and answer the underlying question: “Is it even worth it?”

The lecture comes in two parts:
1. Social project design, what a social project actually is and how a cultural project can be a social one. Also, what advantages come with taking on that extra responsibility. Using my own case, I’ll show how to find the usefulness of your art — its practical application in a funder’s eyes — and we’ll work through one case from the audience.
2. Raising funding. The logic behind building a funding request. Who you go to first, who you ask for money later, and what you spend it on. How a short code number solves a lot of problems, and how the phrase “I run a social project” opens the doors of institutes and embassies — and closes the doors of monasteries.

What advice would you give artists who want to try raising funding?

Find people who are interested in you and need you more than you need them. They’ll become your project’s media or status partners. Asking for money straight away without them is risky.

If the only person who believes in you is your mum, should anyone give you money? But if one non-profit believes in you, plus a foundation, a local brand and so on — handing over money isn’t nearly as frightening.

What should you be ready for? What can go wrong?

Cash-flow gaps and losing your entire team. If we’re talking about social project design and a grant within that kind of project, we’re talking about long-term unpaid work. That’s where all the risks come from.

On top of that, a third of my project was research, and the risk of not finding what I was looking for came true. I found something bigger and more monolithic, but I didn’t confirm my hypothesis.

And yes — the schedule should have had rest built into it, especially with long research trips. My legs gave out after a month. And when you’re the only engine the project has, legs matter enormously.

Tell us about your solo project and its research side.

I lived in the space between two of my true selves: the wish to be a nun, and depersonalisation. And in between — in a world with neither. Without looking at it or addressing it, blind to it.

A need arose to bring them together and pull them into my reality. That’s how the research project was born.

I’d also already lived in a monastery during a deep period of depersonalisation. It got easier there; the space of the monastery could finally hold that black infinity depersonalisation had dug out inside me. So I had a rough idea of what I wanted to find in the research.

Tell us, was the program useful for you?

What helped was Maria’s take that depersonalisation could become a subject in its own right, rather than just a mechanism for analysis.