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Kanis Polina
Kanis graduated from the Rodchenko Art School, Moscow, in 2011. That same year she was awarded the Kandinsky Art Prize in the Best Young Artist category. In 2016 she received the Sergey Kuryokhin Award. Her work has been featured in numerous solo and group shows. Her works are kept in In Between Art Film collection, Kadist Art Foundation, FRAC and others. She was a resident artist in the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten program in Amsterdam and ISCP New York.
Toothless Resistance
In order to resist the prevailing structures, resistance itself must be interrogated. Challenging the notion of ‘action’ and ‘resistance’ is prerogative to reorient the definition of dissent. The non-event in the project is disclosed by the drawn out, slow, and suspended moment. It’s task is to create a sense of stasis, not rejecting change, but seeking to interrogate the dialectical relationship between action and passivity. In this piece it considers how re-describing, and re-sensing our surroundings is a bridge-building exercise of tenderness towards a world visible and invisible to the human eye.
In the video the mechanical eye of the camera lens hovers in a barren room. The camera moves slowly, melting across its features. Natural sounds emerge in the background, cars riding, birds chipping.
The room is a reconstruction of a room where Russian geographer and philosopher Pyotr Kropotkin lived from 1886 to 1917. The interior was reconstructed for a museum on the Smolensky Boulevard in Moscow but dismantled in the late 1930s so it hasn’t survived to the present day. In this very room, Kropotkin wrote his monograph “Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution” in which he claimed that cooperation and not competition is the key factor of evolution. A special emphasis is put on the realization that humans are not exceptional creatures on our planet.
The voice, separated from the video, accompanies the installation with a description of the post-anthropocentric landscape.