Luxury Problems, Object, 2020
The first day in Greece began at four in the morning as a nightmare that got stronger every minute. One hundred twenty kilometers from Athens — Marika and Anton were tucking away while evening, in the place where, as they later learned, the famous battle of Homer with Hesiod had taken place. With great difficulty, artists found a stripe of land between the muddy sea and the road to spread a blanket for the night. The job on that day was to spend the night in this strange place today and see what would happen tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, and so on until they would get to the site. The path from that place to Port25 in Mannheim in Germany that artists knew not how to overcome in 10 days would become the tool to create a work, and the oddities that often occurred in situations like that would become its plot.
Bed in Cadaques, Photo, 2015
Marika Krasina and Anton Krivula assume artistic work as a daily, constant will for creatively recollecting and re-creating the world and themselves, such as daily unproductive scholar (attributed to σχολή) work similar to the job of a taxi driver or window washer. If society captures the space of politics, turning art into an object of consumption, M&A, in response to this, enter the territory of labor and make an invisible, existing-in-itself artistic act (ποίησις) the subject of social relation.
February 24th, 2019, Seoul, Photo, 2019
At the beginning of March 2020, Marika and Anton found themselves in Moscow. The borders were already closed, and an intense lockdown was impending, in the conditions of which Anton would be outside the law on Russia's territory as a foreigner. This obstacle started to threaten their practice; therefore, Anton and Marika decided to slip out of control. M&A have managed to escape into the uncontrolled territory before a complete lockdown started, to manage difficult times holding joined life and artistic work.
Metamorphosis, performative Installation, Port25, Mannheim, DE, 2018
The route to the scene and artists' property served as a tool for the performative installation, presented in Mannheim in July 2018. more
Art intertwines in history; conditions and meanings are reflected in it and imprinted for a long time. One might think that it is the substance of culture that gives birth to art, but the artist knows its source is beyond knowledge. For more than four months, M&A were hiding together on an abandoned peninsula, comprehending their living as a performative practice. The essence is the laying of Zones of Nonknowledge — gaps and bypass tunnels and accepting uncertainty and precariousness as performative conditions and circumstances as material for its actual deployment.
Bed for July 7th, 2017, Cadaques, Photo, 2017
Contemporary art is the artist’s work, determined by creating, developing, and redefining the image of Сontemporaneity as a conventional ersatz space for human life in conditions of ontological deprivation of the present; an effort to recollect and reassemble the interhuman World.
To turn such a hidden, unproductive practice into a condition of art and make the artist with the work-in-itself visible need to open the public space. It requires the curator’s appearance, carrying out the practice of materialization, in which precarious and aimless process renders into the matter. As a result of such materialization, the artist’s unproductive practice acquires Percept’s qualities (using Deleuze terminology), which at a specific moment can synchronize with the viewer’s perception, become an object of storage, and transmission.
Like the Labridae fish, which can change sex in extreme circumstances, Marika and Anton had set up such an observer from themselves. This alien, curatorial mode of action allows combining synthetically unproductive practices such as Zones of Nonknowledge with materialization, communication, and presentation. The material achieved resulted from the fixation of such unproductive artwork: documentary video and photography, audio recordings, notebooks, index of things, maps, and the things themselves act as ersatz objects for materialization and re-materialization of artwork without direct production.
Artistic practice, engaged in the constant recollection of its origins, and curatorial practice following the unproductive artistic process and materializing it for the viewer, together constitute Rabota Institution’s work.
Like the Labridae fish, which can change sex in extreme circumstances, Marika and Anton had set up such an observer from themselves. This alien, curatorial mode of action allows combining synthetically unproductive practices such as Zones of Nonknowledge with materialization, communication, and presentation. The material achieved resulted from the fixation of such unproductive artwork: documentary video and photography, audio recordings, notebooks, index of things, maps, and the things themselves act as ersatz objects for materialization and re-materialization of artwork without direct production.
Artistic practice, engaged in the constant recollection of its origins, and curatorial practice following the unproductive artistic process and materializing it for the viewer, together constitute Rabota Institution’s work.
Bench, Photo, 2020
Such a conjunction practice was actualized at the New Performance Turku Festival (NPTF). The core of the work is the Index of things in the format of a text file in universal digital encoding, which was sent to Finland by email. The Index served as a score for re-materialization in the form of a performative installation implemented exclusively by the efforts of the NPTF team as a separate interpretation.