Ksenia Markelova / b. 1994, Russia / lives and works in Ekaterinburg

The 5th Ural Biennial Main Project features the work:
«A Room» (mixed media installation and stop-motion animation, 2019)

Ksenia Markelova often works with textiles and techniques from sewing and embroidery. She endows her objects with a sense of life through a visceral resemblance of both body and flesh and, at the same time, the morbid feeling of death.

In the vulnerable objects she creates, the artist tries to visualize the interaction between unconscious and conscious structures that constitute a person (and which are constructed by a person). Markelova’s creative work derives from the interaction, including conflict, between fear and desire — she dissects these notions into fragments in order to reveal new configurations of
the whole. In this installation created especially for the Biennial, Markelova experiments with the concept of “eternal materials”—wax, for example, something that can endlessly melt and reform. She also introduces image-symbols of eternity, such as the alchemical serpent Ouroboros eating its own tail. In the endless chain of transformation, the beginning and the end become
indistinguishable.