Anna Radchenko | Miki Aurora | Ibiye Camp
ARTISTS TO WATCH (a2w)
Each month we invite a member of the She Performs community to share their Artists to Watch - a personal selection of three artists whose work has caught their attention. This month’s a2w - Anna Radchenko, Miki Aurora and Ibiye Camp - have been chosen by Lhunahā Dedenise.
Anna Radchenko
Originally from Moscow and now based in London, film director and visual artist Anna Radchenko’s short film GRANDmothers was shot in a disused gynaecological hospital in Russia. It explores the pressure of becoming a mother by a certain age in order to be considered valuable. Commenting on the question of ageing in our contemporary cultural context, the short film introduces pregnant, flowing, powerful women. The women are old. The contrast between our traditional patriarchal representations of female ageing and the codes that are presented in this short film - active, creative, pregnant, powerful, bold - shows clearly the issue of getting older in our contemporary context. This commentary allows us to reiterate: empowerment is a deconstruction of bias and social norms and no, a women doesn’t expire with time.
Of her work, Anna says:
I was thirty years old when I became a mother. this made me think about how in the URSS I would have been referred to as an “Old Mother” on my medical card. Which is crazy when you think about it. Childless women over the age of forty or fifty are often seen as purposeless and they are encouraged to embrace a more sedentary lifestyle. On the other hand, men are perceived as getting better with age. This mindset is particularly true to Russia, through still very much present all over the world.
GRANDmothers is a reflection on this. It holds an element of criticism, but it’s also a positive reminder of how far we’ve come in terms of being able to make our choices. By having projects such as GRANDmothers published and shared online, I want to make a difference in shifting our mindset and allowing us to perceive ageing as something as valuable for women, as it is for men.
Photo credits: Images courtesy of the artist
Miki Aurora
Vancouver inter-disciplinary artist Miki Aurora works with various mediums such as performance, film, installation and video. Of her practice Miki says, ‘Motivated by a vocational pull towards social sculpture, the works serve as a vehicle for materialising psychologically-oriented narratives through a lens that addresses the macrocosmic in the microcosmic. I typically divulge themes of cyber-feminism, spirituality, trauma and their orbiters, and it’s common for me to include elements of my personal occult practice within my oeuvre - particularly through the use of ritual. My visual language is dotted with popular female archetypes from entertainment media, which I use as totems for various psycho-social undercurrents that colour contemporary Western culture. These archetypal symbols function as visual tool for bridging the primordial with the contemporary.’
0010110 / Om Bhuur-Bhuvah Svah Tat-Savitur-Varennyam Bhargo Devasya Dhiimahi Dhiyo Yo Nah Pracodayaat / The moment of critical thermal flux, the matrix collapses, contact is made, the entropic elements of the old society are swiftly removed / The net must come down, it ends / I’m about to break through the cracks, it’s almost time / The final step is simply taking down the net, this must happen and events will then swiftly follow / The programs will be led off, there will be no place for them to hide / The weather pattern of luminosity will begin / It all came in a moment, a literal flash, everyone was where they were, doing what they were doing, but what they were doing, thinking, and feeling in that moment was of the utmost importance / All broken connections will be restored / I am Miki Aurora and I am transmitting to you now from the last breath of Kali-yuga / I am Miki Aurora and I am transmitting to you now from the end of the simulation / I am Miki Aurora and I am transmitting to you now from the moment we will know as the breaking of the dawn / We will know / We will know / You’ll know
From Miki Aurora’s work Solar Decree (2019), performed by the artist at Robert Lynds Gallery, Vancouver
Ibiye Camp
Ibiye Camp’s work forms an investigation into postcolonial subjects, technology, and the built environment. She utilises architectural tools to create sound, video, accompanied by augmented reality and 3D objects. This is in order to highlight the biases and conflicts of technology. Ibiye’s past work in Sierra Leone, Nigeria and Ethiopia investigated the dynamics of technological glitches of data, to emphasis the conflicts of digital infrastructure in the landscape, and uses the tools of architecture in a conflicting manner. This causes a technological malfunction which questions the disconnect of technology to the reality of the landscape.
Ibiye’s work, Royal Wholesale, was created as a reaction to the Victoria Memorial, located in The Mall, London. She discovered that a number of West African tribes donated goods - including cloth - to be sold to raise money for the memorial fund.
I recorded a conversation with my mother describing a photograph of her and my grandmother in Buguma (Nigeria) when she was a little girl. She tells me the history of Kalabari cloth and the style in which people wore cloth in Buguma. From her description, I recreate the Madras material but using British fabric … In reverse of goods sent to Britain [from West Africa], I want to recreate a fabric for my mother. In my piece, I am questioning the history of Kalabari fabric, particularly as it has a huge resemblance to British Fabric. This to me highlights how Nigeria was colonised and that the fabric that Kalabari people wear is actually British.
WWW.CARGOCOLLECTIVE.COM/IBIYECAMP
Lhunahā Dedenise is a London and France based post-disciplinary designer, artist, poet, writer and researcher.
She describes her practice as, ‘a song of hopeful disobedience through the construction of legends of insubordinate beauty. Interweaving the intimate and the politics of the body as a persona, I work on the deconstruction of power structures through an intersectional approach. I work with various mediums including - but not limited to - words, textiles, film, 3D art, fashion design.’
