Description: The Pool by Polina Kanis is a video that exposes reality in all of its dreamy ambiguity. People enter a relatively shallow pool and disappear. This situation tells the story of unconscious phantasms and fears inherent in public spaces. Since the notion of the collective is unable to avoid what it represents, it often bears the traits of inevitability. This idea is given to the audience as an underlying condition which is the most painful to process aesthetically. Nevertheless, it is connected not with personal, but with universal fears. This is the truth of social reality.
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.
