Polina Kanis
2021Formal Portrait
Polina Kanis
The artist reexamines the culture of parades as one of the most powerful ideological instruments. The ceremonial raising of a flag performed by the artist in an enclosed territory without public becomes a metaphor for a victory that will never come.
Formal Portrait
Смена
Polina Kanis
One of the recent video works by Polina Kanis, the recipient of the Kandinsky Art Prize and the Sergey Kuryokhin Award for Contemporary Art. The piece explores how a closed system functions, as well as the idea of presence within and modifications to it. The action in the video revolves around the former building of some kind of closed institution, where the staff are immersed in the ritual of carrying out their duties. Their only objective is to ensure the stability of a system through their physical presence. Everything proceeds in the usual fashion, and only in the final scene is the possibility of any change to the established order hinted at.
The Shift
Разминка
Polina Kanis
A video performance, in which the author examines fitness and aerobics exercises in today’s parks around Moscow as a strange hybrid of totalitarian sport aesthetics, pop cultural new age readings, and the Soviet ideal of harmonious physical development. People who are no longer young warm up under the guidance of a strong, young fitness instructor against the background of the recently restored rotunda in Moscow’s Neskuchny Gardens. The instructor encourages them: «Breathe! You can do it!». They do their best to carry out all the exercises correctly, ready for the main event — a march, to the chant of «left, right, left, right!».
Workout