Sketches for a production of Carmen

Aidan Salakhova is a sculptor and graduate of the Surikov Moscow State Art Institute who participated in the 44th and 54th Venice Biennale (1990, 2011). Her interests include exploring the fragile boundaries of women's freedom, gender and social identities, searching for answers through religious and traditionalist symbolism, and posing questions concerning the desirable and the forbidden.

Her debut as an artist took place at the XVIII Exhibition of Young Moscow Artists at the Manezh Central Exhibition Hall in 1988 with the triptych Steel Orgasm on an Orange Background (1987). A year later Salakhova, together with Yevgeny Mitta and Alexander Yakut, opened First Gallery and then, in 1992, Aidan Gallery, which existed for twenty years and became one of the most important venues on the Moscow art scene. In 2012, she established Aidan Studio, bringing together over thirty artists who graduated from Salakhova's studio at the Surikov Moscow State Art Institute, which the artist led from 2001 to 2022. Since the 2010s, she has spent most of her time living and working in Carrara, Italy, studying the plastic possibilities of the most famous marble on the planet.

In 2019, artist and theater producer Pavel Kaplevich invited Salakhova to design director Maxim Didenko's production Carmen. Drama‑Opera‑Ballet. The artist proposed a set comprising ornamental red cocoons from which the performers emerged and in which they hid. Salakhova embodied in these objects one of her main principles, the animation of sculpture, because for the artist her marble sculptures are always the receptacle of the soul.