Ksenia Yurkova is an artist and curator from St. Petersburg. She works with photography, video, text, installation and the artist’s book. The focus of her main research is language in its diversity: as a channel and means of communication, which has wide and unexplored possibilities of conversion, operating in the field of mythological, stereotypical, but also having the ability to expand and rewrite established meanings. Recently, extralinguistic communication and affect have become a field of interest. Along with this, the artist touches on the issue of personal and political, self-identification and identification by others, problems, trauma, memory and relationships.
Having moved from political journalism, through the organization and curation of cultural and artistic events, Yurkova settled in the field of individual artistic practice and artistic research, which provides the necessary critical distance for working with current issues. Yurkova’s approach is based on methods of linguistic and symbolic appropriation, self-criticism and self-reflection, as well as irony, which is inevitably present in the study of complex topics. Yurkova does not abandon public projects: since 2018, she has been organizing and curating the festival-laboratory <> in Helsinki, and in 2020 she is launching an artistic residency in Austria. Ksenia Yurkova has taken part in numerous exhibitions and festivals in Russia and abroad, and is the author of several artist books and monographs. Her works are in private collections in Russia, Germany, Austria, France and Finland.
