Artist name: Masha Svyatogor

Nominated by: Rafal Milach (Polish visual artist; Nominee member of Magnum Photos)

Country: Belarus

Edition: 1 of 1

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Project statement

“Masks Show” series explores the continuity in the history of arts. Traditions and modern trends constantly endorse and reject each other. Such a strained relationship is provoked mostly by attempts to comprehend today's customs and mores.

This work depicts naked bodies of modern girls, with their faces covered by ''masks''. These ''masks'' are pieces of reproductions of works by famous artists, like Sandro Botticelli, Rogier van der Weyden, Hans Holbein the Younger and other painters, the majority of whom lived in the 15th-17th centuries. In classical art, a female figure usually embodied sanctity or eroticism sometimes these two notions were intricately intertwined in the images of Christian martyrs. Depicted women were denied the right to their corporeity – their image was in the hands of a male artist, and later, of a male viewer. Such paintings were subject to a number of visual conventions making female images as comfortable as possible for shameless contemplation (for example, a nude model could not meet the gaze of the viewer).

Young girls in the works of Svyatogor seem to be in a totally different position: their bodies are free, poses are natural, and they own the decision to pose naked. Yet, the reason why this series was created was the desire of some models to take back/usurp/destroy the original photos that were made a long time ago. Probably, this desire can be explained by the changes in the worldview and perception of one's own body and the social frameworks this body needs to fit in. In this situation, the victim is not a model but the author of the photos who is made to choose between ethics and copyright. The consent to give away the photos could be compared to a painful gesture of abandoning your work for the “good” of your neighbor.

Hence, using a mask seems to be the best option here. A woman tells a story about another woman by covering her face with a mask of a woman from the past epoch. Masking the face is like an attempt to protect the witness. It plays with the modern girls’ perception of their own physicality, which, in common sense, still has an ambivalent meaning of something being too forbidden on one side and something being used exclusively as an object of admiration and desire on the other. It may look paradoxical but refusing to identify themselves with the bodies in the photos, the models may also end up losing control over their representation, thereby joining the cohort of “inspirers” and “muses” of the past centuries. Text by Vera Zalutskaya

Artist statement

In my artistic practice, I refer a lot to Belarus’ contemporary context and focus on eccentricities and paradoxes of everyday life in my country. My research is also aimed at reframing the Soviet past, exploring the ambivalence of the Soviet system and my relationship with the legacy of the USSR as a person who was raised after its collapse.

Each of my work, whether it’s a single piece or it’s part of a series, consists of many layers, patterns, ornaments, details and slices of reality, taken from the pictures photographed by me and transformed then into complex multi-layered narratives reflecting contradictions, inconsistencies and ambiguities inherent to modern Belarus. By combining elements of different historical and aesthetic traditions, I strive to reveal and convey a reality with a lot of different sides and facets, the relations that arise in this reality between objects belonging to different orders.

To realize my ideas, I often use photomontage techniques. For me, creating collage is not a mechanical gluing of random heterogeneous elements, as if accidentally combined with each other, but a way to tell a story or to glue/rebuild an existing story anew. As materials for my work I use my own photographs as well as archival images found in Soviet print media. I carefully collect and select iconic images of the Soviet era, especially those that are important historical artifacts, cultural symbols of that time and significant elements of collective memory.

Finding a new visual style and new aesthetic within the montage method is as essential to me as building a critical message and overcoming stereotypical thinking, preconceptions and predictability of reactions, providing an opportunity for wider interpretations without limiting the viewer.

By mixing seemingly incompatible pieces and fragments, I emphasize the strange and elusive nature of many things that I encounter in everyday life and observe in political, social and cultural environments. Through my works I express my confusion and controversial feelings about the past and the current situation in my country.

https://www.mashasvyatogor.com/