Artist and resident of Garage Studios and Art Residencies, Ekaterina Muromtseva will discuss the specifics of her creative and pedagogical practice: why an artist today may not only produce works for exhibitions but also operate as somewhat of a mediator, an agent between art and the spectator, and how it feels to be a “translator” of contemporary art language for elderly people.
Teaching art occupies an important role in Ekaterina Muromtseva’s practice “I am aiming to make contemporary art more accessible and open. And by this I do not mean one-sided instructive pedagogy, but rather a communication process”, which often converts into art. Muromtseva works a lot with elderly people from different parts of Russia. Within the project Bureau des transmissions she has developed a series of events involving elderly people: “I am going to invite elderly female artists to speak about their works, we will work together at Garage Studios, where I am currently a resident, will organize meetings, shoot a video for a choral ensemble, stage a spectacle, and make a wall painting. Without any specially planned and precise program, the entire process will be controlled by the participants themselves, as I believe it is wrong to impose my own interests, and it is way more important and exciting to follow the ideas of others, whose lives I am able to enter into with the help of art”.
Ekaterina Muromtseva has been working with elderly people for six years now. "It all started when I volunteered at a nursing home in Tula, where I met with an elderly woman, Zhenya, who got seriously interested in art and began drawing a little, using colored pencils and 'imagination' at first, but then paints and from life. Once her phone call woke me up at seven in the morning, as she said she desperately needed an easel, since without an easel she couldn’t regard herself a genuine artist. The easel arrived, and Zhenya turned to canvas painting. One day me and this elderly woman Zhenya visited the Pushkin Museum, and she was so happy about it that she even wanted to stay there overnight. So, we decided to invite her again to Moscow, to Garage this time—to talk about art, have a look at the exhibitions and discuss them, and to draw. We are going to demonstrate Zhenya’s own works together and speak about the show that we organized in their boarding house, and how we painted carpet ornaments on the walls there”.
Muromtseva will also display works created together with other old people, including Our Answer to Kabakov, where the famous artist’s contemporaries reflect on how his practice resonates with their own life in the Soviet era.