Ulyana Podkorytova

Ray’ok

Ulyana Podkorytova

Ray’ok

Ulyana Podkorytova is a prominent member of the contemporary Russian art scene. She graduated from the Rodchenko School, where she studied video art with Kirill Preobrazhensky. She works with inner mythology, the ethnography of the Russian North, and post-folklore (Internet memes, spam, and fake news on Internet sites and social networking services). She examines the problem of the preservation of identity in the age of globalization. Using different media (video, photography, performance, and sculpture) and genres, Podkorytova draws on the ritual and musical narratives of the Russian North.

A key part of the exhibition is the video opera ‘Ray’ok’. Its name refers to the fairground show box (Russian ‘rayok’) that was a predecessor of TV and the Internet. Visitors look into a window in a wooden box to see lithographs and drawings of cities and foreign countries as well as the latest news. The aesthetics of the costumes and scenes in the video derive from fairground mystery plays.

The unusual spelling of the title is no coincidence, as it refers to Russian Internet slang that is based on anglicisms. Every character of the video opera appears one by one with his or her own ‘aria’ that is performed by the artist. The seemingly absurd texts and music stem from the artist’s research of ethnographic and music history publications at libraries in Saint Petersburg and the Arkhangelsk and Vologda Regions and of contemporary Russian post-folklore. Thus, Podkorytova’s project brings together Russian folk hallucinations, inner mythology and Internet folk (memes, chain letters, commentaries left on the artist’s page in a social networking service, images of neural networks, and the mixture of languages resulting from globalization).

Ulyana Podkorytova was born in 1984 in Bryansk. She lives and works in Moscow. In 2017, she graduated from the Rodchenko Art School, where she studied video art with Kirill Preobrazhensky. In 2016, she studied with Natalia Pshenichnikova at the Voice Laboratory of the Theatre Institute. She also received a degree in graphic arts from the Moscow State University of Printing Arts (2007).  In 2017, she was nominated for the Innovation State Prize in Contemporary Art. In 2019, she participated in the New Holland Debut Film Festival in Saint Petersburg and the Platonov Fest in Voronezh. Her solo shows include ‘Slash’ (Winzavod Center for Contemporary Art, 2016) and ‘Single Copy’ (Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, 2018). She took part in the Gogova Foundation Artists Residency (Baku, 2017), Garage Studios (Moscow, 2019), and other artist residencies.