A Woman Making Art

Vera Miturich‑Khlebnikova has been making artist’s books since the 1990s. An heir to the Miturich and Khlebnikov dynasties, she graduated from Moscow Printing Institute and worked on illustration and book design. Experimenting with form the artist creates book‑objects or book‑installations in which the documentary is entwined with the imagined.

In the book A Woman Making Art Miturich‑Khlebnikova explores the theme of time and memory, alternating archive photographs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and newspaper announcements from the 1990s, touchingly combining the narratives of different eras. The announcements were taken from the Russian post‑perestroika publications Vse dlya vas, Iz ruk v ruki, and Argumenty i fakty, which published short messages free and without censorship. Everyday, crazy, heartrending, full of despair or, on the contrary, naive hope, these concentrated little stories are supplemented with carefully selected photographs of unknown people from a discarded archive that had belonged to distant relatives. The anonymous stories become a disturbing collective portrait of the time, and the combination of the verbal and the visual creates the effect of an unexpected dialogue.