The media and performance artist Mariya Vasilyeva was born in Kyiv in 1993. After 12 years, she moved to Bamberg with her family where she spent her teenage years. Following the fairly drastic transition of life in Kyiv to the conservative Bavaria, Maryia started questioning numerous patterns of her own identity, especially as a woman.

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.

Throughout the production process, Vasilyeva depends on her own craft. Whether set design, requisites, digital post-production or analogue fabrication are all exclusively designed and executed by the artist. With this very individual - solitary - process, the artist consciously refers to the process of identity-making, which is often perceived very individually and is therefore difficult to share with others - unless they have made the same experiences. Thus, people often find themselves in a breakaway state of solitude, which, in this special way of Vasilyeva’s work, reaches a moment of culmination. She addresses the themes of fairy tales, pornography and power relations in an extremely intuitive - seemingly innocent - way. Like a child losing itself in the act of playing, inhabiting a million different characters and exploring its own limits, Vasilyeva uses this approach to create an ironically diverse cast of characters and beings. The result is a diorama that is not very different from our own - a world permeated by oppressive power relations, violence, cynical entertainment and permanent transgression of boundaries. Irony is an indispensable feature for her to abstract, deconstruct and distort these repressions in an artistic way, thus adding further layers to them. The resulting montage serves as a projection surface for a state of tension between the public and the private, with the body serving as a vehicle.