Podkorytova Ulyana

Born in 1984 in Bryansk. Graduated from the Moscow State University of Printing Arts and the Rodchenko Moscow School of Photography and Multimedia. Lives and works in Moscow. 

Ray’ok

The exhibition was set up like a theatre foyer and devoted to the migration of images. It included programmes with music scores, the director’s photos, sketches, costumes, ceramic prototypes of performance characters, graffiti posters, and a video opera.
The graffiti poster is based on WhatsApp chain messages. A key figure is a female wolf made from a birch tree. It serves as an iPad stand and an allegory of the peanut gallery (Russ. “rayok”) in theatre, arguably a prototype of TV and the Internet. The photo depicting the theatre director as a demiurge suggests the comicality of authoritarianism in contemporary art; its composition is based on an eighteenth-century lubok story about the funeral of a tsar.
The characters of the video opera have prototypes in the lore of the Russian North, as well as in Internet folklore. I sang the folklore texts to music from computer games and performed comments from social networks in the style of funeral lamentations of the Arkhangelsk region.
Starring:
The Paw from the tale “Bear on the Lime Leg” plays the role of a killer program, an urban myth that spread in the early 2000s.
The Old Women Who Can Make You Hiccup from a soldier’s tale about a walking head (from the times of Peter the Great) perform an aria based on a famous 2017 fake news item about an old lady who was a burglar.
Moscow River, a character in my lubok-style comic series on Gertruda Svirepaya (Gertrude Rude), plays the role of Globalization in the opera, repeating the word “North” in six languages.
A bottom wearing boots is a carnivalesque theme connected to the legend of Peter the Great’s boots, in which he fled from Moscow. The bottom dances to a song with the lyrics of a chain letter about “money-bread”, which is well known in Russia.
The cathedral with legs is running to the sound of 19th century Russian hounds’ names.

The exhibition was held from 29 March to 21 April, 2019 at the Triumph gallery (Moscow) and from 6 March to 28 June, 2020 at the Moscow Multimedia Art Museum