Anna Bitkina is an independent curator, director and co-founder of The Creative Association of Curators TOK, an art organization founded in 2010 together with Maria Veits.
Anna lives and works between St Petersburg and The Netherlands, she curates projects in Russian, different countries in Europe as well as in the US. She sees the curatorial practice as a multidisciplinary process that connects theory, social science, philosophy and politics in order to generate knowledge about contemporary reality where art has an agency to articulate its socio-political conditions and foster social changes.
For the last 10 years she’s been interested in exploring post-Soviet conditions in contemporary Russia and remnants of Soviet past in different social spheres as well as in local and global implications caused by the accelerated capitalism in the region. An ongoing public art project ‘Critical Mass’ that she initiated and curates in St Petersburg since 2010 became a platform for conducting such a research and developing knowledge on post-socialist conditions. The projects breaks into seasons, so far four season with focus of different problematics were conducted 2011, 2013, 2015 and in 2016-2017.
Development of speculative scenarios about possible political horizons in Russia and in the world have been central interests for her projects and projects of TOK. ‘Design Platform’ (2012-2014) and ‘School Museum:Creating History Together’ (2014-2017) conducted in one of the schools in St Petersburg aim at researching on pedagogic conditions of the Russian system of education, its spatial and architectural structures and governmental strategies in shaping up young citizens.
Such projects by TOK like ‘States of Control’ (2017, HIAP Gallery, Helsinki) and ‘Propaganda News Machine: Creating Multiple Realities in the Media’ (2016 Flux Gallery, New York City) aim at stimulating critical thinking around the topics of information manipulation, the history of propaganda, post-truth and constructing news during times of political unrest. A new ply of ‘States of Control’ is scheduled to be presented at the Weisman Museum of Art in March 2020.
A research-based project ‘The Russian Bar: Why Relocate? New approaches to neighborliness and interchange’ (2018-2019, series of events in various locations in Helsinki) is analyzing the conditions of global migration with a close focus on the ‘new wave’ of emigration of Russians to Finland that is since 2011 was formed due to radical changes of political conditions in Russia.
In 2014 Anna was a local contributor for the public program of Manifesta 10 with with a Jeremy Deller’s project ‘The Battle of Orgreave’. and with a new performance ‘Debates on Division: When the Private Becomes Public’ by artist Gluklya (Natalya Pershina-Yakimanskaya). During 2015-2019 the performance ‘Debates on Division’ was conduced at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam – SMBA, at the Creative Time Summit in Washington DC at the Lincoln Theater (the Summit was curated by Nato Thompson) and at RAM Gallery and Deichmanske Bibliotek in Grünerløkka in Oslo. In March 2019 the project was be presented for the 5th time in the Center for Fine Arts BOZAR.
Anna was a research fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Berlin in 2013 -2014 and a finalist of the EUNIC competition for Russian curators with a curatorial placement was in London at Artangel in 2014. Among other projects she curated exhibitions for the 3-rd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2009) and for the 2-nd Moscow International Biennale for Young Art. She was an initiator and co-curator of a major exhibition in Russia of artists from Nordiс region: ‘Nordic Art Today: Conceptual Debts, Broken Dreams, New Horizons’ (2011, St Petersburg), co-curated with Kari Brandtzaeg, Birta Gudjonsdottir, Power Ekroth, Aura Seikkula and Simon Sheikh. She co-curated with Ryszard W Kluszczyński and Sinziana Ravini the ‘United States of Europe’ (2011-2013), an exhibition about European identity that traveled to 10 different locations in Europe, ‘Towards the Other’ with participation of Mieke Bal and “Chto Delat?” (2011, St Petersburg).
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