Anna Kiparis

Artist's Statement

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In my works, I recreate the traditions of Christian painting, expressing them through illustrations for classic world literature. Continuing the traditions of Russian icon painting that have persisted to our day, I adapt them to the contemporary context. My works become a bridge between religious narratives and modern artistic interpretation.

During the collapse of the USSR, I witnessed the exclusion of religion from societal traditions as I grew up in the system. The new crisis of the devaluation of human life, prompted by a series of contemporary armed conflicts, forms a new fold in the concept of postmodern society, bringing us back to the question of what we have overlooked. I turn to the archive of collective memory, considering religious consciousness as a transconfessional treasure. Here, I find a source of deep reflection and understanding of the nature of ongoing changes in the continuum and the value of human life. In my personal experience and practice, I return to the roots of the Christian world and pose the question of what religion can do for society today.

As a medium facilitating the connection between religious text and the needs of contemporary self-identification, I choose imaginative literature. This choice directly influences my creative method, where I continue the traditions of magical realism. Magical realism and religious text operate with similar semantics, using images and symbolic systems to establish connections between the sacred and the secular, the human and the divine. In my works, I actively involve images capable of self-organization in the process of perception. Often, these images are represented by non-human agents, such as plants, animals, and insects, substituting for the pictures of saints.

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Modern artist, art theorist, and curator Dmitry Bulatov aptly describes the direction of my art in his notes:
When the freedom of artistic thought is taken to the extreme (as in Duchamp's "Fountain"), art enters a domain closely related to religion. The discussion of such "religiousness" in art is not coincidental, given that "Religio" (Latin) also means "I bind" or "I connect." This is the search and exploration of connections between earthly and unearthly, human and non-human agents, relations within a community, a biome (or society), and links between a person and dominant discourses (commandments) and institutions. These relationships can be viewed as ways of establishing connections on a secular level (between people, believers, and non-believers) and between a person and God. What is intriguing is that all of these methods are based on aesthetics if we understand aesthetic sensibility as the ability of a person (or, for example, AI and generative neural networks) to react to the connecting patterns.

I appreciate magical realism because, unlike science fiction, which always functions as a packaging of reality, magical realism, on the contrary, aims to unpack reality. It offers a system of images capable of self-organizing during the reading process, often using non-human agents, such as plants, animals, and insects.

I adore all these cows, butterflies, and molluscs because, in my view, it's an effortless and incredibly rapid way to retransmit the semantic self-organization of storytelling through simple animal behaviour patterns. Animals must procure food, seek a safe environment, and produce offspring. Deleuze brilliantly illustrated this when he, in his alphabet, provided examples of the simplest insects, ticks, and lice, which have only three actions they need to perform in their lives: find a place to hide, jump on prey at the right moment, and attach.

By receiving an analogy in the form of an animal, we automatically interpret its behaviour pattern and transpose it into the progression of emotions. For example, yellow butterflies whimsically swarming above the protagonist's head in Garcia Marquez's work reflect the painfully rapid degeneration of human attachment. The butterflies, in the form of flashes of biomass, burn out within a day, creating a vivid visual image when reading.
In contrast, the cows that have taken over the patriarch's castle symbolize gradual changes. In scale, the cows resemble pieces of furniture that clutter the palace; they move unhurriedly, destroying former luxury, chewing on velvet curtains, and leaving cow pies on silk carpets.