Sveta Shuvaeva
From October 17th to December 7th, Points Center for Contemporary Art (Points) was honored to welcome Sveta Shuvaeva from cooperative institution Zarya Center for Contemporary Art for residency program for 60 days.
Sveta Shuvaeva was born in 1986 in Bugulma, Tatarstan (Russia). In 2003 she starts studies at the Samara State University of Architecture and Civil Engineering. From 2008, she takes classes at the unofficial contemporary art academy of the Russian artist and curator Vladimir Logutov. From 2011 to 2016, she works in the collective studio of Vladimir Smirnov and Konstantin Sorokin in Moscow. In 2013 she opened the Svetlana Gallery, her own gallery in a cupboard in her apartment.
In Shuvaeva’s installations, the artist opens a dialogue about political, economic and social trends. She creates imaginary situations in which the viewer becomes part of the installation. Her works are functional and performative, they are layered and critical. In her oeuvre, she focuses on the tension that exists in Russia between the new freedom that is neo-liberal and capitalist in nature and the utopia of the equality of communism, where the economy is not driven by supply and demand but rather by production, under the constant watchful eye of the bureaucratic apparat.
Shuvaeva has detached herself from the Soviet and post-Soviet styles, and has developed her own vernacular. She employs an aesthetic that is reminiscent of Constructivism and Minimalism, with many references to Pop Art. She often incorporates banal consumer goods into her art, to which she adds irony, the use of stereotypical symbols, collages and advertising, and the reproduction of everyday objects in unusual materials, all of which refer to Pop Art. In addition, there are also direct links with Dadaism, in which coincidence, text and readymades function as key elements.
Typical pop-art techniques as citation, copying, and collage are characteristic for Shuvaeva’s work. She is reproducing life’s everyday routine by using objects that were found by chance and carefully preserved. Creating copies of routinely objects, she can multiply them until they lose figurativeness and become an abstract pattern. Or remove the superfluous from something existing, creating a space for imagination.