Bold Lines, Fragile Lines by Olia Fedorova.
May 27, 19:00
May 27 – June 31
ZETA Contemporary Art Center
In this project, the artist continues working with the landscapes of her homeland – Ukraine – through maps. Maps reduce landscapes to clusters of lines, they do not reflect all those tragic changes and ruination they went through because of the Russian full scale invasion in reality. They don’t show anyhow nature’s resilience and will to survive in the middle of catastrophe either. But at the same time they serve as an instrument of documentation of the landscapes, preserving them in the state they were once depicted.
The exhibition brings together two series of artworks.
Maps of the Defence Lines consists of embroidered representations of Ukrainian rivers — rivers that have suffered deeply from the war, yet at the same time have served, and continue to serve, as powerful natural defence lines, delaying or preventing the further advance of Russian troops.
Wound in the shape of the northeastern border of Ukraine in the Kharkiv region is a black curtain embroidered with a line tracing the mentioned borderline between Ukraine and Russia. On February 24, 2022, Russian troops crossed the Ukrainian border in countless locations, one of them being this exact border, just 40 km from Kharkiv — the artist’s hometown. To this day, the border remains a site of ongoing battles and a constant source of threat.
The exhibition is realized as part of Olia Fedorova’s residency in Tirana within the framework of the Foreign Atelier Stipend Program by Land Steiermark (County of Styria, Austria)
Olia Fedorova comes to Tirana as part of a two-month-long studio scholarship by the province of Styria, Austria, organised by ZETA Contemporary Art Center and supported by Land Steiermark – A9 Culture, Europe, Außenbeziehungen.
Born in 1994 in Kharkiv, Ukraine. A multidisciplinary conceptual artist who mostly works with text- and textile-based practices, but also with performance, photography, and video. In 2016, she graduated from the Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Fine Arts and began her career. After Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, she also began to work as an art activist and publicist. Since summer 2022, Olia has lived and continues her practice in Graz, Austria. Since 2024, she has been studying in an MA program in the «Textile, art, design» department of the Art University Linz, Austria.
Olia’s artistic focus lies in the exploration of language and natural landscape as a space of meaning (trans)formation. Recently, she has been exploring how natural environments are transformed, physically and meaningfully, by wars and human-made disasters. In such work, she makes words, symbols, and pictograms dissolve in the landscape, for example, using semi-transparent or disappearing materials, thus speaking on the topics of impermanence, instability, and mortality.
Olia Fedorova had solo exhibitions in Ukraine, Poland, Austria, and Italy. Participated in art residencies, group exhibitions, and projects in Ukraine, Poland, Germany, Austria, Great Britain, Spain, Norway, Argentina, Japan, the Republic of Korea, the Republic of South Africa, the USA, and many more. Her works are included in the collections of the Ukrainian Museum of Contemporary Art (Kyiv, Ukraine) and Jeonbuk Province Art Museum (Republic of Korea), as well as in the private collections in Ukraine, Germany, and Norway
