Sketch for the installation Good intentions

Irina Korina is an artist, theater designer, and skilled creator of total installations from fragments of the material environment and echoes of collective memory. Her first major project, Urangst, was shown in 2003 at XL Gallery. Korina painstakingly directs her constructed environment, creating the dramaturgy and systematically immersing the viewer in a surrealistic whirlwind of sensations and emotions. Her main working materials include cheap, everyday decorating textures, fabrics, tablecloths and oilcloths, plastic facing, siding, and polymeric foam. Loud, tasteless ornament and kitsch decoration play an important role. Korina’s installations are full of carnival craziness and the deliberate fancifulness of various aesthetics.

The installation Good Intentions was created for the main project of the 57th Venice Biennale (2017). The masterfully arranged space was an imitation of an urban environment with fences made of mesh and corrugated steel, and the facade fabrics with whimsical patterns seemed to conceal a ruined building. The improvised walls were covered with neon images and wreaths of artificial flowers. As an ironic researcher of post‑Soviet culture, Korina refers to Moscow’s streets, with their nighttime illumination and tasteless flower compositions. If in real life these simple decorations or, as the artist puts it, “rattles of an infantile aesthetic level,” are perceived as something ordinary and unimportant, within the space of the installation they create an anxious and even sinister atmosphere. Saturated with artificial light, the flower arrangements become funeral attributes, casting doubt on the “good intentions” of those who create an illusion of prosperity in a situation of increasing social inequality.