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.”