Join us on Tuesday, 20 June for an artist talk by Katya Muromtseva, whose current exhibition Women in Black Against the War is on show at Pushkin House until 29 July. In conversation with Professor Sarah Wilson she will discuss her most recent series of portraits of activists and political prisoners as well her artistic practice in general.Katya explored political themes in her work long before the full-scale Russian invasion started. In her videos, watercolours and installations she reflects on historical memory, collective action, political representation and nostalgia. She has always experimented with various exhibition formats and explored the conditions in which culture is produced and presented.

Her artist's statement says: "Through my practice I try to find new forms of existence within the hierarchical social and cultural systems of society: the possibility to renew historical narratives, the possibility to reconfigure methods of exhibition display, the possibility to share the means of production with other artists, the possibility of actual solidarity. My primary artistic focus is on large-scale paintings, videos and installations which refer to personal and collective memory, feature historical obscurities, and unfold in both lyrical and conceptual ways. Within my works I’m asking where the border is between reality and fantasy; I am interested in the narrative where document and artistic imagination overlap. It reflects on my practice in a way of the constant dialogue that I am having with different social groups. Usually this dialogue takes the form of personal narratives that are implemented into my works. I’m asking myself how to be a political artist under authoritarian governments without direct aggressive gestures, but with social empathy embedded in pure visual artistic forms and constant working with people."

Ekaterina Muromtseva is a visual artist with a background in philosophy and stage design, whose lyrical-conceptual work investigates personal and collective memory through imaginative forms of documentation. She works with different media: installations, videos, graphics, socially engaged art. She has had solo exhibitions at the M HKA Museum, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow Museum of Contemporary Art, XL Gallery and was part of a group show at Steirischer Herbst Festival in 2018. In 2019 she was an artist-in-resident at Garage Studios & Art Residencies Moscow. The same year she was a winner of the Present Continuous programme of the V-A-C Foundation and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp (M HKA). She received the 'Innovation' contemporary art prize in 2020 and a Fulbright fellowship in 2020-2022.

Sarah Wilson is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Courtauld Institute of Art, and Honorary Professor at University College London. An art historian and curator, her work spans international avant-gardes, transnational histories of leftist art and Cold War Europe (including the USSR and later Russia), through to contemporary global art. She curated the landmark exhibition Paris: Capital of the Arts, 1900–1968 (Royal Academy of Arts, London; Guggenheim Bilbao, 2002) and the Pierre Klossowski retrospective at Whitechapel (2006), among numerous other exhibition projects. Her books include The Visual World of French Theory: Figurations (2010), and Picasso/Marx and socialist realism in France (2013). In 1997 she was appointed Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government.

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