Banding, 2008 (with Masha Kovaleva, Masha Timonina) is an ironic exploration of modern wedding rituals: dressing up and taking photos with tourist attractions. The “brides” also asked male passersby to put rings on their fingers. Photo: Alexander Lubin
Still from Art of Braiding, 2018. Playing on a Russian word “kosa,” which can refer to a braid, a scythe, or a spit of land, the Gentle Women explore the deep symbolic meaning of women’s hair
Art of Braiding, 2018. The group enacted a mythological rite, braiding their hair together with dune plants, mixing the corporeal with the natural. The painful process of unbraiding also acts as a metaphor for leaving one’s roots
Still from Bread and Salt, 2009. Bread and salt are symbols of hospitality in Russian culture. Here, the bread is fed to the insatiable seagulls, and the salt is thrown into the low-salinity Baltic Sea
Bread and Salt, 2009. Shot by Kosty Traschenkov and Anton Zabrodin. Edited by Aleksander Podoprigorov
Breathing Lessons, 2021. The lit match requires oxygen to maintain the fire, and the artists are ready to offer it their breath. In the era defined by COVID, this performance makes references to the simple act of breathing and to the sense of burnout
Dirt, 2010. Young women living on the Curonian Spit were considered the worst brides: the local soil of was infertile and they were almost dowerless. They usually went to the Lithuanian side of the bay to get married and rarely visited home afterwards
Dirt, 2010. These young women wore black dresses as their wedding gowns. In this performance, the duo imagines the ritual of bidding farewell to the home and the native soil before leaving and getting married
Dirt, 2010. Shot by Alexander Lubin. Edited by Serge Sorokin
Ice, 2012. The Russian expression “to be flopping like a fish on the ice” means to struggle desperately. Here, a young woman in a white dress, a symbol of unwanted femininity, is trying to break the ice just as desperately
Urtica, 2017. The performance is inspired by a fairy-tale in which a young girl faces a challenge to knit 11 shirts from nettle without crying or saying a single word. The work is a reflection on problems of internal and external censorship
Milk for Vera, 2015. When Eugenia’s daughter was born, she was taken to the ER, so she couldn’t see her child. Photo: Anton Khlabov
Milk for Vera, 2015. For a month, she was saving her breastmilk, and dedicated this performance to her daughter, who was in the hospital, and to all the Madonnas. Photo: Anton Khlabov
Head over Heels, 2015. A woman throws herself from a sand dune as Jerzy Petersburski’s song To Ostatnia Niedziela (Wearied Sun in Russian), known as “tango for suicides,” plays
Personal Christmas, 2020. Holidays can be an especially lonely time. In this performance, a woman in a golden dress carries a Christmas tree on her own, walking along the seashore and through the empty night city