Mariya: Of course, in some way I’m following the tradition of performance artists, of feminist artists, but I think what’s original about my work is my sense of irony, is combining my background from the Eastern Europe with the Western Europe. My medium in the first line, I would say, is not video or performance, it’s collage.

Anna: How do you feel your background and your experiences have influenced your artistic practice? You talk about your experience as a Ukrainian immigrant in Western Europe.

Mariya: I moved to Germany at a very sensitive age, and my personality was caught between two societies. When you move to a new country as a young child, you assimilate quickly. When you come as a young adult, you identify more with your home country. But at 12, you're neither here nor there. I came from a very big city, and we moved to a very small one, so it was a cultural shock. And I didn't speak German. I stuttered so intensely that sometimes I couldn't talk. This was a big problem because, as a child, you learn languages by speaking to others, and I couldn't. So, I was very culturally isolated. I quickly discovered the world of the internet: Tumblr, Flickr, and all these under-ground communities for young creatives. And it inspired me to start with photography. And I instead discovered this visual language. When I was 14, I started to take my first self-portraits. I didn't have friends who could model. So I thought, well, fuck it. In my room, I did my first set of stagings. With my very cheap camera, I took my first photos and posted them on Flickr, Tumblr, or these societies to connect with other people, with other young adults. This was between 2008- 2010. It was a culture of self-portraits. You may be familiar with this, but surreal self-portraits were a huge trend. So that's how this all started. By the time I was about to finish high school, I had a huge portfolio of photos. My art teacher saw it by accident and was like, 'Wow, Mariya. You should go into arts; you should apply to an Art Academy.' I was like, what's that? I had no idea.

Die Videoinstallation "Soviet Baroque" der Künstlerin Mariya Vasilyeva dient der Rekonstruktion bzw. Inszenierung eines Raumes, der eine positive wie auch negative Konnotation innehat. Wir sehen eine skizzenhafte Raumdarstellung der Wohnung ihrer Großmutter aus Kiew am Boden (Vgl. Dogville, Lars von Trier, 2003): Küche, Schlafzimmer, Wohnzimmer, Badezimmer. Weitwinkelbeamer projizieren auf zwölf großen, beschichteten MDF-Platten Videocollagen, die Vasilyeva zuvor zusammengeschnitten hat.

Den emotionalen Ambivalenzen (Gewalt und Liebe) tritt die Künstlerin gegenüber und reflektiert ihre Kindheit, besonders aus der Sicht als Erwachsene. Die Besucher*innen werden daher mit dem Erlebten und/oder den Erlebnissen, die Vasilyeva transportieren möchte, konfrontiert: Ihre Arbeiten sind von der künstlerischen Praxis der Selbstdarstellung geprägt. Ihre emotionale Diskrepanz (lateinisch discrepantia ‚Nichtübereinstimmung') gibt sie visuell und akustisch wieder.

In den ersten Jahren der Kindheit wird die Psyche des Menschen geformt. Daher ist die Inszenierung der Räumlichkeiten ein Spiegel nach außen. Die reflektive Erfahrung für das Publikum ist dementsprechende intensiv. Vasilyeva verwendet lediglich authentische Gegenstände und Klamotten, die aus der Wohnung stammen, um Rollenbilder zu untersuchen – d.h. es wurde nichts extern hinzugefügt.

How do the culturally prefabricated role models of a woman come into being and which ones serve as playful means for my art?

These questions constitute an intrinsic component of Vasilyeva's artistic work. By the age of 14, she had started experimenting with photo collages made from a myriad of self-portraits, attempting to bridge the gap between two socializations - that of Eastern & Western Europe. Her work explores the impact of today's digitalized economy on postmodernity, focusing on themes such as pornography, propaganda, and the struggle of self-articulation and regulation. Her primary emphasis throughout the production process is to intensely engage with her own body. By duplicating, amplifying, deforming, dehumanizing her body - thus altering her identity - she endeavours towards a new aesthetic that is characterized by the process of moving away from the human towards the abstract - non-organic, non-human, and mystical, thus creating an artificial being made up of a thousand individual parts of herself. The video works frequently display extracts of her naked body, acting as sculptural foundations, which are linked with figurative, crude and fantastic symbols and, in a continuous loop, portray a snippet of motion through time and space.