I have a higher education degree — I trained as an interior designer, and drawing and fine art were taught alongside it, though of course institutions like that never set out to “make an artist” of you. So there was a huge gap between what I wanted to do and what I was being trained for. Building a conceptual idea and being able to show it to experts, to other people, is something else entirely. The way I see it, you could even call it a form of scientific knowledge.

– What were your first works?

– I made experimental works in the modernist vein; they weren’t connected to each other and didn’t follow any logic. Then, in 2017, I started thinking about making series of works. In 2018 I made my first series, which was fairly recognizable, even though it was never covered anywhere. It had to do with magical masks that embodied human fears. That was painting, and only in the past year have I moved on to other mediums. In November 2021, while watching Ghost in the Shell, a new subject came to me. I thought: why not devote myself to art, if I love it this much? And I started trying to strip away every cliché in the way the technological future gets imagined. To my mind, contemporary art is capable of visualizing an image that matches the present day and creates a unique code that searches for the forms of the future.

– So what does the future hold for us?

– I don’t answer that question so much as sense it coming. It’s a zone of responsibility beyond human scale. Evolution will happen either way, but the key question is whether we take part in it consciously or simply drift through it. And as far as my own experience goes, when the mind isn’t occupied with something, a person degrades fast. We have no choice but to evolve!

– Life before the course: what wasn’t working and what questions did you have?

– Before the course I went through a long stretch of changing my subject. From a very particular kind of practice tied to existentialism I arrived at a brand-new project, “The Birth of Amara”. I did an enormous amount of inner work — my state swung between deep depression and pure elation. But because the course gave me a clear mechanism for pinning a project down in a form everyone can understand, it was finished successfully and the inner crisis was resolved over the course. I got a mass of answers to questions that had been troubling me for a long time.

– What were your results after module 1?

– After the first module I realized I had never actually done any real analysis of artworks. Over the course I produced far more professional work than anything I had done before. It became more relevant, more constructive. And of course, for someone sitting in an environment with no information, this is almost impossible to do. I’d say that you can make a great project on intuition alone, but once you’re given a system, everything reads completely differently. On top of that, on some intuitive level my thinking coincided with what Maria was conveying, so I slotted into the whole process very naturally.

Key insights?

– I already had a picture of how the art market works. There had been plenty of attempts to build connections with various people in the US and Europe. I went through a fairly chaotic period in that respect: before 2017 I had nothing to show, and then came a very particular kind of practice — brutal, red-white-and-black, decadent. It was art made out of extreme experiences of horror. At one stage I found several buyers in Europe, art collectors I’m still in touch with today. And that kept me from showing up in Moscow and Smolensk. And even so, that position led to a crisis.

– How did your view of the art scene change?

– As I said, after 2017 I started on my first conceptual project, which is on hold right now. And in November 2021 I began something completely new — a project built on the aesthetics of anime meeting Renaissance painting, and above all it’s research into a subject and its problematics. I never set out to copy some fashionable shell. The task was to look at and scan what other professionals in this field had done, so as not to fall into somebody else’s script. At first my work was about producing a setting — what I pictured for myself wasn’t just an exhibition, but contemporary art in which various mediums convey the spirit of a kind of metasystem transition, the transformation of the human being into a new quality, a spiritual upgrade, cyber-healing. There was a long stage of going through primary sources, separating the newest subjects from what has by now become retrofuturism, and from what is dying off stylistically and conceptually and can no longer be used. At that point several works appeared that were simply still in development. And then, in the first module I started finishing those works; I saw that this was exactly the subject worth developing, that it got a real response. Getting support at that stage was very important. And it mattered even more to know that the support was coming from a professional. Someone who doesn’t just tell you “well, that’s nice” — instead the relevant problematics and the subject crystallize. During the first module I started making new installations, so the whole time I was taking the course, work was underway.

– Your project: how did you prepare for it and what came out of it?

– The project is called “The Birth of Amara”. Amara is a character I created. I conceived an archetype capable of staying with people for a long time once it goes viral in the media, in a new field. I did a lot of work to avoid making something that had already been made. I was trying to find a new identity and make it thoroughly legible to the viewer through art and texts, so that it could later appear in the media as the protagonist of an exhibition, a music video or an animated film. In the end I started building a platform for the future integration of this meme, this character, this unique identity named Amara.

– What’s the title of the final project you presented in the second module?

– The project is called “The Birth of Amara”. Amara is a character I created. I conceived an archetype capable of staying with people for a long time once it goes viral in the media, in a new field. I did a lot of work to avoid making something that had already been made. I was trying to find a new identity and make it thoroughly legible to the viewer through art and texts, so that it could later appear in the media as the protagonist of an exhibition, a music video or an animated film. In the end I started building a platform for the future integration of this meme, this character, this unique identity named Amara.

– What subject are you working with in this project

– The evolution of the self, the making of a meme, human self-improvement — it’s a broad range of subjects. Media noise among them.

– And how does that subject play out through your character?

– The character is free from outside influence; she’s like a wise guide into a mode of being where a person is free of informational noise. And all the energy that isn’t spent on rumination and fear goes into self-improvement. Amara has the ability to resist informational interventions. These are, after all, programs; they’re memes. If you take a meme not as a picture with a caption, then it’s Richard Dawkins’s term for any conceptual informational system capable of self-replicating in the human mind.

– What did the concept of the exhibition you presented in the second module consist of

– Amara is a creature from the near future, the product of a merger between the human and technology, a being with a more developed consciousness than our contemporary — in other words, she is a “super-being”. The exhibition includes painted images: large-scale canvases, or more accurately “monumental” ones. Stylistically they synthesize traits of anime culture and Renaissance painting, and they carry a unique pictorial code unlike anything else. There’s also a video installation in the show: a large portrait of Amara, built in 3D graphics, animated with neural networks and a speech-generation network. The clip is edited in a particular way so that it doesn’t get boring to watch and produces a meditative effect. In the video Amara recites a mantra, though here the mantra carries no religious overtone — it could just as easily be replaced with any set of words — but the sound of it envelops you. So the aim of the installation is to draw the viewer into a meditative state, and the video installation is the load-bearing element of the display. It’s shown in semi-darkness, or in a room with the lights off. The space also contains sculptural forms: a 3D print of Amara’s head, a copy of the sculpture I made as the first prototype. The next one will be a print of a 3D model made by a designer. All of it is tied together by a system of cables with extension leads and neon cords — flexible LED strips, I think. That way you don’t have to use the gallery’s own lighting at all: you run a system of extensions and cords, add bubble wrap, and turn it into a separate aesthetic element, an art object. The atmosphere, on the one hand, immerses you in an artist’s studio, a process of reassembly, a process where Amara is being made right now; on the other hand there are elements that recall a laboratory.

– I remember when the course was just starting, module 1, and everyone was only beginning to get acquainted in the chat. And then you posted Amara. And she said, “Our meeting is bound to be a promising one.” It was great! Honestly, at first I thought the chat had been hacked, that aliens had landed and we were about to negotiate for the chat’s return!

⁃ Let’s just say the meme was born in the chat!

⁃ That’s wonderful! You don’t think it’s possible, and it makes you, as a viewer, start seeing the world differently.

⁃ Yes! And on the exhibition, it’s worth adding that it can be shown with different numbers of objects, but it reveals one and the same phenomenon — the possibility that a being of a new level, a new order, exists across different dimensions. We get a kind of cyber-physical experience.

– What stayed with you most from the second module?

– There was quite a lot of information, and I usually need some time for my working memory to take it all in. The last lesson on structuring is what actually made the project possible for me. I had a notion that there were certain objects and some idea of how to do it, but it never occurred to me that visualization was needed. After the final exercise I understood that without structuring there is no project, because otherwise there’s no way to communicate what you want to make. That basic culture of communication came down on me right at the end of the second module.

– How did the final presentation feel, and Maria’s feedback?

– I was nervous! I thought I’d written the text too densely. I made it very academic, scanning all sorts of images so as not to make something derivative and irrelevant. At some point I realized it was too complicated. And during the presentation, when I heard that Maria’s thinking and mine converged, I let myself feel glad, because I firmly believe a project has to be carried through to the end, to some tangible realization.

– Can you share your overall impressions of Maria, of the teaching, of how the course is built

– I was pleasantly plugged into current information. I spent the whole summer studying and making new work, and looking back I think it’s very high-quality structuring. I’m honestly amazed at how much energy Maria has; I can’t imagine how it’s done. I work in cycles, for instance — there are peaks, and there are times when I need to refill. I understand perfectly well what it does to a person when dozens of people come at you with their own searches, and I know I wouldn’t have lasted as a teacher. The freshness of her angle is obvious throughout the course — she never repeats herself and she always has new food for thought. And the sense of being in a forward-moving current lasted the whole way through. I think that’s fantastic! Because in closed spaces, closed communities, progress is impossible. And she inspired the installation too, because the idea of whether artificial intelligence could be a vehicle for sacred knowledge was something she raised at a portfolio review. I carried that idea around for a few weeks, and then the idea of reciting mantras was born. The mantra was dedicated to the power of the earth. And when I was setting up the speech-generation software I tried several different options and realized this one sounded much better.

– What are your plans after the course, what’s your mood

– My plans point toward MMOMA. I looked at their program, and it fits very well with the chance to show “The Birth of Amara”. As I understand it, it’s better to be in the capital and in closer contact with the art community. After the course I really enjoyed studying! Before that I was at a stage where I thought there was nothing left to learn: I put ten years of painting on the scales and decided I’d done everything I could — I was closed off. And now my appetite for learning has come alive on a scale I’ve never known.

– And the final question: tell us what contemporary art means to you

– Contemporary art is, on the one hand, an intellectual field, and on the other a sacred one. You create a version of reality that the viewer can be drawn into through well-organized mediums and the texts you write. And on a deep level that version lets a person move to a new level of consciousness. It may sound grandiose, but it refreshes the way you perceive reality. It’s a kind of capsule for transformation into a new state. The way I see it, contemporary art finds a new code — plastic, visual — in which a person can feel the freshness of being and shed the weight of the past, reformat themselves, and get the impulse they need to keep moving. At least that was the idea behind “The Birth of Amara”.

– Are you speaking from the point of view of the effect on the viewer looking at contemporary art, or from the artist’s point of view while making it?

– While I’m making something I think about how the viewer will perceive it. Because the period of fiercely subjective work, where subjectivism ruled everything, is behind me; now I look at the piece in terms of whether it works or not by the laws of perception, and through experiment I adapt the work to the viewer, so that they get the impressions I have in mind when I conceive the project. A hard question, actually! It lays bare the transcendent task of art.

– Still, from the artist’s point of view — what is contemporary art for you when you’re making it

– As an artist I want to create a current code for the way I see the contemporary world; I want to reflect the multiculturalism that’s beginning to reach every corner of it. And the moment I started diving into the search for that code, the result was “The Birth of Amara” — a project that is the sum of the means which, in my view, express permanent evolution, big events on the scale of an individual life, and the Asian world with its innovations in artificial intelligence. My gestalt is complete by the end of the project, and the project itself is my answer to my own sense of what is relevant. So the search took place in a kind of transcendent state, in a mode of intense inquiry and information-gathering, in an attempt to understand what is actually happening and where we’re heading. And in reworking some fairly emotional conclusions in painting, in installations… But in fact it’s a positive project. It’s about how we’re going to be all right, how we’ll keep improving — that’s the note it was made on. And in the end it’s our own will that colors the way we picture reality!

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