Irina Korina was born in Moscow in 1977, where she lives and works today. Studies took her from there to Gothenburg and Vienna, but it was arguably her first calling as a scenographer that had the strongest effect on her work. Her works are marked by a theatricality visible in their command of space and scale. Building themselves naturally into their surroundings, they engulf the viewer in surreal extrapolations of ordinary sights and experiences.
Korina does not progress through conceptual cycles, but different spaces and materials. Every new work is immediately recognisable as hers, and markedly different from those preceding it. Early room-size installations making full use of the walls gave way to those exploring structural possibilities and physical involvement, covering a floor with tilted wooden panels one had to slip across to see a video projection, inviting the viewer to crouch through a padded corridor, or clamber over a pile of old laundry machines. Gradually Korina's work has come to find itself in stand-alone objects like the one before you, but she never let her interest in the viewer slide. Above all, she has remained a visual artist in the purest sense; rather than communicating through visuals, she finds expression in visuals themselves.
As such, Korina never felt the need to pepper her work with references and place it within a contextual narrative. This gave critics a tough job of pigeonholing. Since she worked in a genre synonymous in Russia with the Moscow Conceptualist school, some tried to place her within that tradition of the "total installation." But whereas Ilya Kabakov's work amassed mundane details of everyday life to create suspended, crystalline portraits of the Soviet experience, Korina's early pieces approached those trifles as physical objects. 2000's 29 Transformations, her first solo exhibition, was inspired by supermarket displays where plasticwrapped food lies side by side with fake food and vegetables under glass counters. Blue-tinted photographs made it impossible to distinguish between them, while the plaster bulges and dim light bulb clusters protruding from the walls added to the impression these facsimiles had thrust themselves into a common comfort zone without really being noticed.
Korina describes herself as a "contemplator," a "collector of feelings." This means that unlike Kabakov, whose installations illustrate texts that can be used to decode his visual symbols, she finds a "text" of sorts in the very materials she works with, allowing the viewer to draw his own narrative from them. Taken from their everyday context, they contain a multitude of associations that provoke personal emotions specific to the individual viewer. That cheapness belies a fascination with the lofty ideas throwaway items can represent, the dreams that they can hide, the messages they can contain. Her work is not an aestheticisation of trash per se. Instead, it explores it to find the innocent beauty lurking in ordinary life.
A recent series took monumental Soviet architectural forms as the basis for exploring changing attitudes to the "bright future" once espoused by Communism - always around the corner, always just beyond reach. In dressing the frame of the never-built Palace of Soviets with a casing of swimming-pool tiles or reconstructing the People's Friendship fountain with feeble plastic coverings made in sweatshops the world over, Korina's aim was to show how that dream died, slowly, indistinctly sinking into the minutiae of Russian life. But this is no ironic comment on the impossibility of the Soviet utopia. Rather, it finds the same value in the everyday materials that came to stand in for and cover those ideals that SotsArt founders Komar and Melamid saw in the monuments themselves. Following the removal of dozens of Soviet statues in 1992, they rallied artists to their defense in Artforum, writing: "These monuments are not just history for us, they are our lives. It's not so much the monuments themselves we want to preserve as the beautiful sweet world of our childhood."
In Korina's work, those symbols from her childhood are presented innocently, just as is. Back to the Future (2004), her most figurative work, contains a mural of happy cosmonauts waving from space that could have been taken straight from the Brezhnev era. The wall separating the viewer from it comments less on the impossibility of that future than on how it has become part of the past. Unreachable, it is something for memory to treasure.
On their surface, then, Korina's materials are intrinsically worthless. But it is that disposability that lends them their emotional value. Other works feature plastic tablecloths
and tacky linoleum that entered the home to cover up holes and dusty floors. For many in the turbulent 1990s, when everything was available and nothing was affordable, these ramshackle approximations of marble-and-gold luxury were the closest to the real thing available. With the help of computer technology, third-world production lines, and economic globalisation, they allowed ordinary people to surround themselves in second-rate facsimiles of beauty.
Korina uses them to find fantastical shapes and dimensions to extrapolate the personal significance they carried into the private mind. Night Charge and Untitled (both 2008) explored the mythical air that items as simple as food and toothpaste can take on under the spell of advertising. In the latter, blown-up pictures of flowers and berries form spirals beside a small shelter, which appears to have someone living in it. Once put through the imagination, these simple objects provide a shelter from day-to-day banality. In Korina's hands, those materials have much more than a material purpose. They can give us solace and value; they can tell us stories.
The ominous-looking thing in front of you that may at turns look like a jellyfish, Kraken, spaceship, or enchanted tree attempts to give a voice to the former USSR's most voiceless - the silent underclass of economic migrants known as gastarbaitery. Warped and perverted far beyond its original meaning, as so many other loan words in Russian, it denotes a silent underclass of economic migrants from impoverished former Soviet republics (predominantly Central Asian countries, although there are a fair share of Azeris, Armenians, and Moldovans, among others), some two million of whom come to Moscow each year in search of work.
Despite the crucial role they play in Russia's economic development - the epochal transformation of its major cityscapes to include skyscrapers and shopping malls would be unimaginable without their labour - gastarbeiter has become at best a term better left unsaid, at worst an ethnic insult. Waiting to go through customs in Sheremetevo airport, it was Jean Baudrillard who remarked that the Soviet Union had acted as a kind of glacier, preserving the virulence of the Tsarist-era pogrom and letting it loose, unchanged, after its collapse. In addition to long hours, low pay, and dangerous working conditions, gastarbaitery frequently face nationalist rhetoric and racially motivated violence on a horrifying scale. For Russians, they have taken the place of the Other; alien, unknown, ever-present, at once to be feared, scorned, and fought.
Korina's sea monster is in many ways a physical manifestation of that otherness. Faceless, but distinctly handmade, its components are as instantly identifiable as its concrete meaning is elusive. The luminous yellows, violets, and pinks slowly emanating from its mysterious crystal head combine with the chill wind and leafy bottom surrounding it to give an ominous, surreal atmosphere. Yet that otherworldly setting betrays the nagging familiarity we see in its body. The tatty uniforms and bright safety vests hanging from it are parts of our everyday visual fabric so common that we accept them as natural, or simply don't notice them. But here, even these unassuming clothes have the power to scare us, reminding us of the dark corner they occupy in our comfort zone and the dozens of individualities they signify in a light at once tranquil and foreboding.
In Britain, where the Polish plumber is fast becoming a stock character alongside the Indian shopkeeper and the Filipina cleaner, both the fabrics used and the different sense of an Other they conjure allow Korina's work to be interpreted in new ways. Medusa's material is all from London; she spent a few days hurtling around its outskirts in search of something sufficiently cheap, which proved surprisingly difficult. Are we, then, banishing personal experiences from the city centre, making it a blank slate we cannot hope to draw emotions from? Korina does not attempt to answer that - the final interpretation is always the viewer's. But when set against the life and wonder she finds in old clothes and plastic bags, the monotony of the marble and glass outside certainly seems to be missing something.
Max Seddon
Max Seddon is a writer and critic divided between London and Moscow, where he was until recently chief art critic for The Moscow Times. He has written widely on Russian art and culture for publications including Frieze, FlashArt, and artforum.com, and is currently finishing a dissertation on Vladimir Mayakovsky's Left Front of Arts.