Bio
Yulia Sharkina is a body-oriented performance artist from Ural. Born 21.07.1987.
Studied at the Ural State University of Architecture and Art, Department of Image Design.

Yulia was born in the Ural region — a place where nature and people are interwoven into a dense fabric of mythology and lived reality. Since the age of thirteen, she has studied psychology, Taoist, and shamanic practices, which shaped her perception of the world and became the foundation of her later artistic statements. In her current practice, she continues to draw on the wisdom of these traditions, weaving them together with personal experience.

At the core of her art lies ritual as a way of inhabiting the cycle of life–death–rebirth. Through performative actions grounded in corporeality, memory, and spirituality, the artist explores both personal and collective identity, engaging space, time, and inner states as active participants in the ritual process.

Her practice encompasses both artistic forms and everyday rituals: massage, the banya, and bodily exercises. These processes function as anchors of stability in daily life and directly influence the artistic forms she creates.

The key themes of her work unfold through the following cycles:
• encounters with the totem animal (The Birth of the Sacred Deer)
• working with the shadow (Immersion, RUSALKA, Femme Fatale)
• exploration of sensitivity (INTIMITÉ, I Would Like It If You Touched Me, Merger)
• experiencing loss and letting go (Girls Cry, Body Memory, Folds of Memory, The Skin)

The artist conceives her practice as a sequence of rituals born from lived experience — both everyday and sacred. Through these practices, she builds bridges between the inner and the outer, between personal experience and collective memory, between the present and the future.

In her work, she examines and explores the sensual side of everyday life, working with photography and video, and creating large-scale textile installations,
costumes, and objects.

She participated in the "Body Language" art fair at the 2024 Venice.
Her work has been presented in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Yekaterinburg. She has also exhibited at a music festival in Berlin, and her work "Harvest Time" was included in the "To Be a Plant" exhibition, which has been shown in Estonia, India, and Italy.

She has created performances in various spaces, including Marina Gisich Gallery, the Sergey Kuryokhin Center for Contemporary Art, Name Gallery, the SDVIG performance arts studio (St. Petersburg), VINZAVOD (Moscow), Makletsky House, the Yeltsin Center (Yekaterinburg), and others.

As a model, she has collaborated with Vivienne Westwood, Kim Jones, Ziad Gahnem, Frankie Morello, Zandra Rose, Andrew Logan, Bart Dorsa, and many other international and Russian designers and artists.

She curated the GIRLS project to support female performance.
Coordinated the exhibition "NEMOSKVA"
Creates art residencies for artists and teenagers.

Completed the "Cultural Initiative/Leadership in Creative Industries" program at Universal University.