Alena Tereshko
Studio grant holder in Umeå September – November 2019
I work with bodily practices and I see my work as a way to reclaim body and body knowledge. I use various forms from painting to new media.
One of my subjects is the gaze – understood as both an actual artistic experience and an outcome of the academic tradition. I draw myself from different perspectives using only my own eyes. I don’t use a photo camera or mirrors. The experience of posing has much influenced the sketches. I try to grasp the details during the process of watching and drawing at the same time and then summarize observations on canvas.
I would like to reclaim corporal perception while today’s world has mindcentered mentality. In a practice of painting we have physical quality of a body. We paint by our body: by our hands, fingers, eyes, through the agency of brushes, and so on. Our body is physically involved in painting.
Also a painting on canvas is a piece of matter. And the viewer also takes part in a kind of a bodily practice (at least my paintings require such participation).
In the residency I would like to develop the “Upside down”-project. We all know that our eyes get all the information upside down and then the brain turns it over. The interesting thing is when you draw yourself from the upside down position you make another turn and it puts you into uncomfortable state where you face your physicality. You meet with the same uncomfortable state when you need to expose the painting and to put them on the wall. Where is up and where is down? And finally the viewers find themselves in this disposition: as there is no upper part of the body on the paintings the viewer has to complete it with either their own or the painters body.
I am planning to observe the potential of this effect deeply.
Alena Tereshko (1986) graduated from Saint Petersburg State Art and Industry Academy named after Stieglitz (2013) and from the School for Young Artists at PROARTE Foundation (2013). Tereshko is a member of the “Parazit” art group and the “KhudKruzhok” collective. Tereshko is the winner of the Sergey Kuryokhin Prize (2017) in “The Best Media Object” category. Alena Tereshko works with performance, graphics, animation, and video.
Alena had solo exhibition among them: “Superposition” (Namegallery, St.Petersburg, 2019);“This Apple” (Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow, 2019), “Leib & Körper” (Intimnoe mesto, St. Petersburg, 2018); “Unforeseen” (Inner Voice gallery, St. Petersburg, 2017); Conditional field (TAIGA Space, St. Petersburg, 2015. She participate numerous exhibitions in St.Petersburg, Moscow, Ekaterinburg, etc. in Russia and abroad. Tereshko twice took part The Internationale Kurzfilmtage, (Oberhausen, 2016, 2015).