Anna Li is an artist from Odesa, Ukraine, and is currently based in Milton Keynes, UK. Her art practice is led by the life experience of being a person with disabilities in Ukraine. By shedding light on the lives of persons with health issues, she wants to bring people with disabilities into the art world from which they’ve always been excluded. Using tools and strategies related to oil painting, digital media, and commercial photography, she strives to explore the role of stereotypes in the perception of the beauty and sexuality of people with disability. By creating a conflict between imperfection and attractiveness, she focuses on the flaws of the bodies but places them in an erotic context through angles, colors, and environment.
Zhenya Skvortsova is an occasional culture worker. As a part of self-organized sex-critical Gasp Magazine collective, she explores the contradictions and liberating aspects of sexuality. Zhenya was born in Arkhangelsk, but since 2018 is based in Riga, where she is currently completing a master’s program in Digital Humanities.
Ann Dmitrieva is a visual artist working with post-documentary and artistic photography. Originally from Moscow, russia, she is currently based in Auroville, India. Her projects examine the unconscious and the influence of the past on the present. She is an organiser of independent events and exhibitions in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, as well as the Crystal Sadness festival of experimental music.
Since russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine, ties between the cultural workers of Ukraine and russia, already complicated after the annexation of Crimea and the start of the war in Donbas in 2014, have become almost impossible. In esports, where Ukrainian-russian teams have always been widely represented, NAVI, Team spirit, and Aurora gaming still exist and continue to participate in competitions. Some streamers continue to broadcast in Russian, although, for example, Petr1k and yXo no longer doing it. At the same time, coexistence in the virtual space is not neutral. The impersonal landscapes that players enter are politicized both institutionally, through tournament operators, like the decision under what flags teams perform, and personally, through conversations that are conducted on discord by sportsmen, streamers, and ordinary players.
Second Life, where these conversations took place, is not a game but rather a virtual space with certain properties. Players here can choose a way of virtual existence that is acceptable to them: participation in communities of interest, creating virtual images of themselves, texting or voice chatting and traveling through the landscapes of the virtual world.
Anna Li, an artist from Ukraine, while studying at the Baza Institute, used the possibilities of this game to reenact performances. For the Typography reader, Anna chose this form for a long-distance conversation with the artist Anna Dmitrieva, a fellow student from the Process School, and Zhenya Skvortsova, a cultural worker she got to know while playing. In conversations, Anna raises the topics of home loss and migration, representation of atypical physicality, strategies for living in a capitalist society, and interaction with the russian cultural context.
Disclaimer: Some of the wording in the conversation may seem problematic. These conversations appear without editing, and their vibe is what seems valuable: reminiscent of the frankness and impartiality of children’s games with friends and strangers.
Subtitles in videos are available in three languages: English, Ukrainian and Russian. You can select it in the bottom right corner of the video, ‘Settings’ – ‘Subtitles’.
Chat with Zhenya Skvortsova
Notes:
Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (Rom. Babardeală cu bucluc sau porno balamuc) is a 2021 Romanian feature film directed by Radu Jude that won the top prize at the 71st Berlin International Film Festival.
Gasp Magazine is a platform for multifaceted discussions on sexuality, eroticism, and queerness. The team reflects on the politics of sex, psychic confusions, and the strange joys of transgression. The creatresses think freedom is processual, and sex is a vital part of it.