Host Andrey Kovalev meets a female artist who invented the Soviet version of installation as a medium: Irina Nakhova will talk about her famous “rooms” and more.
Irina Nakhova (b. 1955) is a graduate of the Moscow State University of Printing Arts. Representing one of the generations of the Soviet underground, more precisely, the Moscow Conceptualist circle, she started exhibiting in the early 1980s. At the same time, her main medium became installation, or environment—slightly before Ilya Kabakov turned to the same type of art, employing spatial and architectural relations. Nakhova’s project “Four Rooms” (1984–1987) is commonly regarded as the first installation work in Russian art (or, in philosopher Boris Groys’s words, the first total installation). Over the years, installation has become Nakhova’s signature medium, and she continues to work with it today. In 2013, her Untitled won the Kandisky Prize in the Project of the Year category. Meanwhile in 2015, curator Margarita Masterkova-Tupitsyna invited her to represent Russia at the 56th Venice Biennale, making Nakhova the first female artist to present a solo project in the Russian pavilion.
