All photos courtesy the artists and Wagner + Partner, Berlin.
A telephone booth. A newspaper decomposing in the street. An apple core tossed from the window of a car as it breezes down the highway. Where some see banality and garbage, multimedia artists and identical twins Maria and Natalia Petschatnikov see potential. Their work focuses on everyday objects so commonplace that we barely even notice them. For example, for their 2009 installation “Sidewalk”, the Petschatnikovs made 100 pigeons from pressed paper found on the street and replicated their urban environment in the gallery, allowing the viewer to enter the typically unseen world of refuse that the birds inhabit. The Petschatnikovs defamiliarize these objects by manipulating their contexts, forcing the viewer to reconsider the overlooked items in their own lives.
The Petschatnikovs were born and received a classical arts education in St. Petersburg. They continued their education abroad, studying in New York, Paris and Rhode Island. Though they currently reside in Germany, the Petschatnikovs are self-confessed addicts of the artist residency. The pair have participated in no less than ten residencies throughout Europe. Rather than using their time to create their collaborative art, they turn the residency itself into source material for future projects by exploring their new environment. The 2008 series “Found Things” evolved from two such residencies in Scotland and Norway. The pair made casts of roadside garbage, like crushed soda cans and drink cups, which they then carefully painted with traditional tartans or Norwegian patterns and returned to the site at which they were found. The delicacy and uniqueness of these new objects captures their hidden national identity and allows them to tell the story of a globalized world.
From “Found things,” painted polyurethane. Scottland 2008.
Donoschik spoke with Maria and Natalia Petschatnikov about their work, their background and what it means to be Russian artists working abroad.
Donoschik: You often work with materials that are not traditionally considered artistic–plastic bags, roadside litter, paper found in the street. What appeals to you about these materials?
Maria and Natalia Petschatnikov: We communicate with the viewer through specific choices we make. Materials, technique, size, position of objects in a space, are all means of bringing our idea across. Each project calls for its own material, just as different situations call for different reactions. Both “art” and “non-art” materials are charged with information, and we build on layers of meaning they carry.
What kind of art were you exposed to growing up? Do you think the visual culture in Russia at that time has influenced you? Similarly, you came of age at the end of the Soviet Union. What was the art scene like in St. Petersburg then?
We come from a creative family; both our parents were involved with the arts (theater and film). Our uncle William Brui is an abstract painter, who’s been living in France since the early ’70s. We drew a lot, and our parents brought us to the children’s art school of the Hermitage Museum when we were five. We loved looking at Rembrandt, and the ancient Greeks, were fascinated with the museum atmosphere (and still are).
We were too young to be involved with an art scene in Leningrad in the late ’80s. We learned about Pushkinskaya, Timur Novikov and his New Academy later, when we were already studying in the US. It seemed to be quite a colorful scene, with distinct “characters.” Looking back at it, from our today’s perspective, we are more interested in it as a political and social, rather then an art, phenomenon.
As teenagers we knew for sure that art taught in academic context was not interesting to us. We loved literature and theater and couldn’t come to terms with the fact that the only valued criteria in academic art was technique. The first official exhibitions of Filonov, Malevich and Kandinsky were shown in the Russian museum at the time and they left a great impression on us. We started to be interested in abstraction. Russian theater design of the early 20th century was another inspiration at the time. If not for a scholarship to study art in the US, we would’ve considered studying theater design in Russia.
