Women artists on their profession

Today we’re sharing the stories, thoughts and experience of two artists from the contemporary art foundation MaxArt — Galya Fadeeva and Liza Popova.

Galya: “Usually it’s a shortage of resources — time, concentration, space. You can deal with that simply by starting to do something. I’m glad I found a studio where I can work; I remember perfectly well the time when I didn’t have one and how much I had to hold myself back.”

Liza: “For me the hardest thing is sensing my own boundaries. I don’t always know where I end. I constantly want to try myself in different fields, in different artistic practices. On the one hand that’s freedom, on the other it’s spreading myself thin.

I make films, take photographs, do stand-up, edit, sometimes act… And every so often I ask myself: should I rein this many-sidedness in and focus on one thing? Or is it the other way round — should I use it as my strength?”

Galya: “Most of my projects have to do, in one way or another, with things pushed to the margins of consciousness or of culture. Here’s one example. When the curator Ilya Kronchev-Ivanov asked me to make a piece for the exhibition ‘How to Catch a Moth’ at the Nabokov Museum in St. Petersburg, I decided to work with the writer’s correspondence with his sister, Elena Sikorskaya, and their childhood memories of the house they had left behind on Bolshaya Morskaya Street. It felt important to pull the museum visitor’s attention away from the celebrated writer and towards the inconspicuous figure of his sister — after all, plenty of great men had women like her, invisible, right beside them.”

Liza: “Every project of mine raises, in some way, the themes women most often come up against. My first photography show, ‘Fragility’, was about violence. The second, ‘What Do We Know About Women?’, was about the women of Bukhara. They made such an impression on me that I simply wanted to tell them: ‘You are magnificent!’ So I made a series of portraits against the same red background — so that nothing would distract from their faces, their eyes, their gestures, the way they held themselves.

Right now I’m looking into tears and the role of professional mourners in different cultures. I’m interested in how society regulates who is allowed to cry. For men, crying is often taboo, while women, on the contrary, are expected to display grief. But even women’s tears can be more than an expression of emotion — they can be part of a tradition, a social ritual. In my project I try that role on myself, and try to understand what it means in the world today.”

Galya: “In Russia there are almost no residencies a woman artist could come to with her children. As far as I know they do it in Vyksa, but places like that can be counted on one hand. I’d like more women to be able not only to make art but to buy it and build their own collections. I was leafing through the catalogue of a well-known Russian collector’s holdings recently and found that at most 20 percent of the works in it were made by women.“

Liza: “I’d like to see more art labs for women artists. It would be a great format for sharing experience, finding new solutions and making joint projects. I think a space for dialogue, where women artists can freely discuss their ideas and work out new strategies, matters especially right now.“