Eggs



Video Artist: Polina Kanis
Country: Year: Duration: 17 min 16 sec

Description:

The work is a video documentation of a performance showing the artist on a rooftop, trying to catch into her skirt the eggs that fly from all directions. She catches some, but not all. The artist runs from left to right – just like the Soviet electronic game where the wolf from the popular child’s cartoon “Nu, Pogodi!” catches eggs in a basket on the screen. ‘Eggs’ makes a statement on the gender status of the individual, as part of the social structure of prescribed relations between the sexes. It is the video documentation of a performance in which the artist reviews the theme of voluntary female victimization and the nature of aggression that exists in socially legitimate forms.

 

Videostills:


Polina Kanis

Polina Kanis was born in 1985 in Leningrad, where she studied at the Herzen State Pedagogical University before continuing her studies in Moscow at the Rodchenko Art School of Photography and Multimedia. In 2011, she was a Kandinsky Prize winner in the “Young Artist” category and in 2016 she won the Sergey Kuryokhin Award for Contemporary Art in the  “Best Media Object” category. Kanis has also won and been short-listed for various prizes in the Innovation awards for contemporary art. Solo exhibitions of Kanis’ art have been held at the 5th Moscow International Biennale for Young Art (2016), Manifesta 10 in St. Petersburg (2014), and also in Baku, St. Petersburg, Turin, Kiev and other cities. She is a regular participant in Russian and international exhibitions. Kanis’ works have been acquired by the Kadist Art Foundation (Paris), the National Center for Contemporary Art (Moscow), the Museum of Modern Art (Warsaw), the Aksenov Family Foundation (Moscow), Stella Art Foundation (Moscow), the Vladimir Smirnov and Konstantin Sorokin Foundation (Moscow), Videoinsight Foundation (Bologna) and by private collectors.