Research Praxis Space: exhibition of the atelier participants, curator Hanna Zubkova
In August, the Moscow gallery "Electrozavod" hosted an exhibition showcasing the final works of students from the second cohort of the one-year program "Contemporary Art." We gathered descriptions and photographs of the projects created by participants in artist Hanna Zubkova's workshop "Research Practices" and asked the mentor to share her thoughts on the learning process and the student projects.
How the Workshop Was Structured and Why
This was my second cohort for the research workshop and my fifth year of teaching overall. One of the students, Yulia, once asked what had changed for me over the past year, as everyone had voiced their reflections aloud at a meeting. While it took me some time to answer, it wasn’t difficult to explain: this year, I wanted to place as much trust as possible in the participants. I didn’t want to test my abilities as an artist but instead, build a dialogue with each student as an artist themselves.
I suppose a significant change came about due to the unique context. In the middle of the year, tragedy struck. I think, if it weren’t for the students, it would have been much harder for me to emerge from the petrified state of pain and loss of all bearings. I devoted several classes to the topic of artists during wartime (Roskomnadzor requires calling the current situation a “special military operation”). After those meetings, some students concluded: it seems we are those artists now. The circumstances revealed a valuable aspect of what is often called art: the process, the community, the time, the shelter.
One of the more challenging tasks for me as an instructor is to guide an artist through their own practice, helping them see its boundaries and question them, and reflect on their work within broader contexts—even when their practice is not entirely close to my own. I aim to assist students in the journey from intuition and doubt to the stage of creating a work, using their own expressive tools. In my workshop, the mediums and works of students are diverse. I don’t impose a single working method but offer various tools and mentorship. This allows students to arrive at something new based on their own skills, perspectives, and personal experiences. Many describe this process as reaching a new level within their own journey. Throughout the course, it’s important for me to find a balance: sharing knowledge without limiting them, sharing my experience without presenting it as the only right way, being present without interfering. Through this approach, artists can continue working independently after the course, without feeling lost in the knowledge and approaches they've acquired.
About the Student Works
I am particularly grateful to Alisa Sokolovskaya and the work we did together for one of my own pedagogical transformations. I am thankful that I didn’t give up, even when it seemed like there were obstacles everywhere.
Alisa's project, Smashrooms, is the result of applying research tools to push the boundaries of her medium. At the beginning of the journey, we formulated the task: to develop the medium of painting, rethink the familiar themes, and explore stepping out of the canvas by engaging with space.
Smashrooms is a mixed-media installation where painting, ceramics, light, ready-mades, and interaction with a specific site come together to create a triptych that reflects on the idea of catastrophe. A microbiologist by training, Alisa shares her emotional response to catastrophe, observing it without moral judgment through the perspective of a non-human other: for example, a fungus.
Katya Leonova's work Debris is an installation composed of sculptural objects and documentary photography. Debris is one fragment of a field study of the abandoned children's camp "Solnyshko" in the Moscow region, which was privatized a quarter of a century ago and has remained in ruins ever since.
This research merges with memories of a childhood creativity club at the same location, the barely endurable pain of the last eight months, and the courage to document at any cost. Today, the document might be a shard, debris, or remnant that has fallen out of history. With the precision of a scientist (Katya is trained as a biologist and veterinarian), she manages to capture fragments of cosmic dust from memory, drifting away from a sun that has been removed from the future.
For Olya Tsedenova, research tools have become her literal method of working: her project Khar Khaalh. The Black Road is a manifestation of her investigation into the forced deportation of the Kalmyk people from 1943 to 1957. The project began with the creation of a genogram—a family history diagram to describe key events across generations, aiming to process the ongoing traumatic experience.
The deportation of her family, both a decisive event and a figure of silence, is intertwined with the mass forced exile of an entire people, who were declared enemies of the state by Stalin. This event is woven into a long history of repression. In 1924, the Kalmyk script Todo Bichig ("clear script"), created centuries ago by a Buddhist monk, was replaced with Cyrillic. After the deportation, not only was the script fragmented, but the language itself was dispersed and nearly eradicated.
Working with archives, documents, and testimonies led to an unexpected material form, created performatively: from a distance, the object appears as 13 wooden planks, representing a fragment of a train car used for mass deportations, including Olya’s family. Upon closer inspection, signs emerge: 13 words, a listing of the years of exile, which the artist carved into the wood using the "clear script."
For Nastya Nemro, research became more of a tool for understanding her own practice, and, as a result, an opportunity to step into a space that connects graphics, installation, fleeting interactions with the public, and a poetic response to the political context. Two of Nastya’s works are part of the Russia 2222 series, which emerged from her rupture with her homeland and under the influence of a new perspective on the events after February 24 and their aftermath: a testimony of error and chalk drawings on the gallery floor, gradually erased as people walk over them.
The performative work Biodiversity is both a graphic attempt to imagine a child’s drawing of grass on asphalt in the future and a gesture implying disappearance. The wall drawing represents the transfer of an accidentally made error in personal notes, where thoughts about the future slipped, along with automatic writing, into reflections on the present. The error crept in as a strange testimony of a desire to be in a place where everything has already ended and to leap into an unattainable century where everything will be different. Or maybe not.
The sense of error, the irreparably wrong year, is linked not only to the experience of war. Dissolved in the media noise during this time, a law was passed allowing the construction of objects in protected areas without the need for permission. Nastya attempts to imagine this carelessly overlooked horizon of the future and delegates the simple repetitive gesture to another artist (since she herself cannot be in Moscow)—arbitrary and rare strokes of green chalk on the concrete floor.
A memory of home became the starting point for Maria Vetrova's project Carpet. While far from her family in temporary accommodation in Armenia—a hotel with a comfortable but generic interior devoid of history and memory—the artist was struck by a moment: the rays of the setting sun highlighted a long rectangle of light on the standard carpeting, casting shadows that resembled her childhood room.
Working with Masha was fascinating as I observed how her background in textiles and fashion unfolded within the realm of contemporary art. Masha successfully transformed her skills and experience into expressive tools: in addition to her Carpet project, she created the book Last Price—a catalog of clothing from second-hand stores.
This collection of life-affirming quotes printed on worn-out knitwear sold at minimal prices emerged as a reflection on the paradoxes of everyday life and industrial self-deception. The artist approaches these themes not merely with irony, as it might initially seem, but with careful attention: to the vulnerability and fragility of mental camouflage, and to a manifesto of the lost ideal that has eventually become accessible. Masha continued to develop her practice by incorporating cultural codes, text, and play into her artistic language, and after the course, she participated in several exhibitions in Russia and Europe.
