Artist
Olga Shurygina
Born in 1987 in Russia, Olga is a multimedia artist creating her projects in Uzbekistan, her mother’s homeland. She graduated from Moscow Industrial Art Institute in 2013. In her works Olga uses a variety of media - from subject art, installations, and performance to social research and cinema. She addresses the topic of her female genealogy: both her grandmother and mother came from Uzbekistan. Olga treats this country as a timeless space, a portal where she finds answers to questions.
In her first projects she started from classic art forms - subject art, performances and photographs, and applied mixed media method in her current project Mirage - installation, social research, movie technics. This is a social research project about the Aral Sea disaster and the people living in it‘s aftermath. The starting point was the idea to suggest the locals in the town of Muynak, a former seaport, sharing one ceramic plate and laying out a mirage on the bottom of the dried Aral Sea near the town. The results of which were expressed in an installation on the bottom of the extinct sea and a full-lengthy film Olga created while working on the project. Also working in this vein, by her own, she explores female artist possibilities in a contemporary traditional society.
“My work is a path from small forms to large ones, from serious mental practice to an intuitive and free play method. My life has become an indispensable part of this conscious philosophical method. Last project Mirage can serve as an illustration of this approach. Here I play a game in which the object turns into a tool to communicate with the whole country.”
Mirage
‘Mirage’ is a research project on the ecological disaster of the Aral Sea and the people living in its aftermath. The starting point was the idea to suggest the locals in the town of Muynak, a former seaport, sharing one ceramic plate and laying out a mirage on the bottom of the dried Aral Sea near the town. The ceramic plate as a symbol of the local / national unity, craft, became a toolbox for my dialogue with people, a symbol of a hospitable resident typical of this country. As a result of this gesture, a collective organism was born, and the people became my co-authors. Having started with city dwellers and their homes, I continued to get acquainted with the staff of local organizations and institutions. Then contacted the city administration, local schools. Eventually, the mechanism that I launched began to operate without my participation. On his Facebook page, the country vice prime minister posted an ad inviting all the concerned citizens of Uzbekistan to participate in the project.
Residents of all regions, school students and teachers started sending plates, having previously published group photos with them on several public websites and on social media. The Tourism Committee handed me over 1000 traditional cotton plates. As a result about 3,000 plates were collected. At the end of the project
the central Uzbek television filmed a report and broadcast it on television. Now the plates are stored in Muynak. Olga videodocumented the whole process, the final work is the film ‘Mirage’.
July 10, Olga launches a fundraiser on a crowdfunding platform. At the expense of this money, Olga plans to organize a film screening for residents of the city of Muynak at the bottom of the dry sea at sunset. As lots it will be possible to buy one of the plates from this project, the plate will be specially marked.
Movie trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIGTqcDHWek&t=9s
Wardrobes
‘Wardrobe’ is a series of objects and portraits inspired by Uzbek dowry and women artisans. Huge still lives of furniture pieces, wrapped in fabrics hand-painted by my grandmother or printed fabrics she developed while working as the chief fabric designer at the local silk factory. "I wanted to visually measure human life. I traveled across Uzbekistan last summer, I was really interested in dowry tradition, it looks like huge fairy wardrobes with traditional embroidered fabrics and once, after my grandmother’s long move from Uzbekistan to Moscow, I packed all my things in an apartment in Moscow and created the first still life, wrapping all things in my grandmother’s fabrics."
Shuzbekistan
Shuzbekistan (Shurygina+Uzbekistan) is a series of photographs and ceramic objects the contours of which repeat the original Soviet ceramic plates. The photos Olga took during her first trip to her grandmother in Uzbekistan depict Uzbek women and local life. Olga addressed the connection with her grandmother and mother, the traditional female symbols and the role of women in modern society through the lifestyle and profession of her grandmother Olga, who worked all her life as the main fabric artist at the silk factory in Margilan, Uzbekistan. It was based on female concepts common to both Russia and Uzbekistan, such as traditionally female craft and traditional female symbols.