Negative Space

Ksenia Yurkova is an artist, curator, and researcher, living between Russia and Austria. She considers her leading artistic media to be text, photography, video, and installation. Yurkova started her practice as a researcher in the field of political and communication theory. The main focus of her interest for a long time was communication and language: the varieties of its substance, the possibility of conversion, its mythological aspect, stereotyping (the question of personal and political identification), problems of memory, attitudes, and reliance. Lately, the artist is researching the phenomenon of affect in its autonomous bodily emanation; in its personal and political registers. She focuses upon how a stage of individual perception, to which one can relate memory, traumatic recollection, and problems of identity construction, transforms itself into affects of the political body.
Coming a long way from political and cultural journalism, through organising and curating cultural and art events, Ksenia settled in individual artistic and research practice, which allows the vital critical distance for observation and work with contemporary issues. Her approach is based on methods of language appropriation, over-affirmation, self-reflection, and self-criticism through ironic components inevitably added to the most pressing matters. Nonetheless, Ksenia didn't give up socially engaged practice and launched a festival-laboratory Suoja/ Shelter in Finland, and an artist-in-residency research programme InSilo in Austria. Ksenia Yurkova has taken part in numerous shows and festivals, has released several artist books. Her works are in private collections worldwide, mostly in Russia, Germany, France, Finland, and Austria.