Oksana Polyakova (b. 1990, Moscow) is an art historian, curator, researcher, and Field Research project manager at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art. In 2012, she graduated in art history from the Moscow State Pedagogical University. In 2014, she was assistant curator of I Live, I See, Erik Bulatov’s retrospective at Moscow Manezh. From 2015 to 2018, she was a participant in the artist-run initiative Krasny in Moscow. In 2016, she took part in the EUNIC Internship Programme for Young Curators at Tensta Konsthall in Stockholm. Her curatorial projects include Transparent Borders (Krasny Centre, Moscow 2017), Ilmira Bolotyan. Date in the Museum (Fragment Gallery, Moscow, 2017), Ilmira Bolotyan. Immaterial Labour (Moscow Museum of Modern Art, 2019), and Between Zero and One. Alexander Pankin and the Avant-Gardes (Moscow Museum of Modern Art, 2019). She lives and works in Moscow.
Daria Bobrenko (b. 1994, Moscow) is an art historian, researcher, and coordinator of the Field Research program at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art. In 2017, she graduated in Art History and Theory from the Surikov Art Institute in Moscow and in 2019 completed the Master’s program History of Artistic Culture and the Art Market at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. She lives and works in Moscow.
Beca Lipscombe (b. 1973, Edinburgh; lives and works in Edinburgh) is a fashion and textile designer, printmaker, and a graduate of Central Saint Martins. Her professional practice is multi-layered and draws upon a vernacular aesthetic. This sensibility was evident in both her eponymous label (2000–2007) and her work as a freelance designer for various companies, including Liberty, Chloe, Stella McCartney, and Ann-Sofie Back.
Until 2011 she taught on the MA Fashion+Textiles at The Glasgow School of Art, stepping down from this post to concentrate on her own work and the work of her company Atelier E.B, which she runs in partnership with artist Lucy McKenzie. Lipscombe’s varied practice has included the production of fashion, commissioned display and interiors for public and private spaces, textiles, furniture, and publishing.
Lucy McKenzie (b. 1977, Glasgow; lives and works in Brussels) is a visual artist who works with painting—including public murals, interior décor, and illusionism—to explore hierarchical systems. She studied at a private school for decorative painting in Brussels in 2007–2008, and the commercial techniques she learned there have been central to her work ever since. Techniques such as fake wood, marble, and tromp l’oeil, with their labor-intensive modes of production, and alignment of value with skill are innately conservative idioms. For McKenzie this conservativism facilitates a tense relationship between form and content.
She exhibits internationally, including solo shows at Tate Britain, London (2003), MoMA, New York (2008), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2013), and Fondazione Bevilacqua la Masa, Venice (2017). Since 2011 she has, together with designer Beca Lipscombe, produced fashion collections under the name Atelier E.B. The label explores alternative methods of producing, exhibiting, documenting, and distributing independent fashion. Their exhibition Atelier E.B — Passer-by was staged at Serpentine, London in 2018 and Lafayette Anticipations, Paris in 2019. Through the figure of the fashion mannequin it examines the intersection of art, fashion, commerce, and display.
