„I met Stepanida (Stefani) Vakhotina a few months ago. She came to the opening of the provocative exhibition and wrote a very nice and funny post about it. Gradually it became clear that Stepanida has been describing the events of her life since 2005. Stepanida’s life turned out a little differently from the normal life of an ordinary Russian girl. At the age of 33, she managed to experience about as much as not everyone at 45. Some lyrics are very sad and dramatic, others funny and others cynical.“ – I. Zaidel.
Mechnikov National University of Odesa Faculty of History and Philosophy bachelor of cultural studies Theme of the thesis: Semiotics of museum space in contemporary urban culture.
Projekts
OFAM Kids Camp 2020 and 2021 – – Development and implementation of an educational children’s programme Exhibition „Last Freedom – Late Sketches by Nikolai Gluschenko“
2020 (OFAM) – Curator Exhibition „Sever and stylisch. Art of the long sixties“
2020 (OFAM) – Assistant curator, catalogue compiler Exhibition „100 years later. Kyriak Kostandi“ 2021 (OFAM) – Author of the excursion programme Creation of the bilingual audio guide
2021 (OFAM) – Author Children’s educational exhibition project „I am the curator“
2021 (OFAM) – Curator, developer, teacher
Honors
Diploma for outstanding contribution to the development of the Odesa Fine Arts Museum
Issued by Olena Oleinyk – the Director of the Department of Culture, Nationalities and Religion of the Odessa State Administration
Workexprerience
2016 DonauFest – Ulm, Germany Representative of Ukraine, Speaker – open talk about cross-cultural work
2019 STEP school – Seattle, USA Methodist, cultural and educational supervisor – organising a children’s cultural and educational programme – lectures and field trips
2019 Odesa Fine Arts Museum, Ukraine Researcher in the Education Department – guide service – lecturing
2020 Odesa Fine Arts Museum, Ukraine Researcher in the Science Department
archival research
designing and producing exhibition catalogues
preparation and supervision of exhibition projects
2021 Odesa Fine Arts Museum, Ukraine Researcher, Head of the Education Department, Head of the Children’s Education Department
2022 Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg, Germany Researcher
Was born in Moscow. Graduated from the theater department of GITIS (Russian Institute of Theater Arts). From 2015 to 2018 she worked at the Moscow School of New Cinema as a producer at the theater workshop of Yuri Muravitsky. She also supervised the theatrical part of Moscow festivals: „Archstoyanie“, „Art-ravine“, „Territory“.
Since 2018 she has been working as a film producer. She shot a large number of advertising projects for brands such as Loreal, Pepsico, Vogue, McDonalds, as well as music videos for SBPCh, Black Seed Oil, Husky, Scriptonite, etc.
In 2020, she made 6 documentaries about various ethnic cultures in Russia together with Pierre Christian Brochet. She also produced a feature short film by Alina Nasibullina „Objects in the Mirror“.
In 2021, she entered the Anatoly Osmolovsky BAZA Institute of Contemporary Art, where she continues her studies to this day.
Geboren 1995 in Dänemark, lebt in London und Paris. Er hat in Göteborg studiert und absolviert derzeit seinen MFA in Bildender Kunst an der Goldsmiths University of London. Seine Praxis ist interdisziplinär und umfasst Musik, Literatur, Philosophie, Kuration, Film, Performance, Installation und Skulptur. Er hat bereits in der Tschechischen Republik, Schottland, Frankreich, Norwegen, Schweden, Dänemark und Deutschland ausgestellt. 2021 nahm er an der Kunstmesse FIAC 2021 in Paris teil. Er lebt und arbeitet in London und Paris.
Originally, my show was supposed to be about language as object and non-standard ways of circulating language, thus creating a new epistemological field, supporting our experience of communication, dialogue and correspondence. Court language or Hofsprache, seemed like a perfect match for this since it’s a very old technology in language, that has kept its implications and identity throughout its whole existence. When we engage ourselves in court discourse, we are aware of what the implications are of utterances as such as well as statements. Nevertheless, I, as you see, abandoned this idea and decided to organize an exhibition around identity and biography. Hofsprache and court language still plays a role here, as that specific function in language ascribes us a precise and enclosed identity. In court we are responsibility for our actions and words with our body. We support what we say with our body. Does this resemble how we respond to an image? Do we share the same attachment to an image of ourselves, as we do to the voice and utterance of ourselves? I’m interested in how the portrait, the image, and the idol creates identity. And how we mirror that visual identity, and further on how we internalize that image and use it as an internal production of the self. These pictures were shot in the latter part of 2020 in Berlin, why it is even more special to me, having them exhibited here for the very first time. Together with Anna Petrova, I’ll be performing a script on the opening day named Resort. It was written summer 2021. One can hear a recorded version of it, solely performed by me, on a tape recorder in the gallery. Remember to change to tape B when tape A runs out. The script deals with identity and memory, how the slightest movement in our conception of ourselves, as for example in an incident of a disease, can dissolve the identity with which we face others and our environment, as well as our internal conception of the self.
Thanks a lot to Igor Zaidel for making this exhibition possible. Thanks to my friends in Paris for sharing ideas and thoughts.
