2021 · textile installation and solo performance (17 canvases)

The work emerged in the run-up to Julia Sharkina’s birthday, as an attempt to fix in material her first year of life in Saint Petersburg. Going through her habits and recurring images, she noticed that she tells her own story through a handful of important stories, and turned each one into a canvas. For this work she rented her first studio, on Mokhovaya Street. Over a month there she sewed and dyed seventeen cotton canvases, each 1.20 × 1.20 m: she mixed dry pigments into a solution she prepared herself. She also recorded the sound for the audio track in the same studio, with the help of artist Andrey Svibovich.

The performance plays stories recorded in her own voice, in Russian: her first memory, the birth of her children, the death of her first husband, relationships, breakups, betrayal. Each story is tied to one canvas. As a story plays, Sharkina ties the fabric around herself like a skirt. The voices layer over one another like an echo, and by the last story they all sound at once. In the intimate space, the audience hears the audio track together with her breathing, her steps, the rustle of fabric. The fabric grows heavier, and the artist loses the shape of a human being: she becomes a heap of fabric and can barely move.

In the second part she removes the canvases one by one and unties the thread of her story. The work ends with a naked body and the words “I was born.”

Even the brightest memories hold us back and pull us back to the moment they happened. The viewer is invited to sort through this heap and decide what to take away.

Materials: textile (cotton), dry pigment, body, voice

Shown:
21 July 2021 — Sdvig studio of performative arts, Saint Petersburg
25 July 2021 — Noor Bar Electro, Moscow

Photographer: Maxim Grachev