This is a screenshot from Oculus Vr App " Maybe Our Mother Didn't Want Us"

Maybe Our Mother Didn't Want Us

A mother and cats


Single figure of a man depicted, concentrated physically and mentally on oneself. He is kissing himself, hugging himself in a state of looped awareness. And here is how today’s context completely changes perception. What should’ve been read as a selfloving, narcissistic gesture now becomes a sign of hard times and a choked necessity of touching another person. What is so special in physically hugging another human being? When you hold hands with yourself, you can’t properly separate the feeling of a touched hand and the hand that touches. The sense of “other” is what is important. 
Though it is one figure, you can clearly see how it starts to bifurcate. Modern rise of mental diseases is drastically supported by isolation. Also,“Swollen”, or “swelled head” means: a person with an exaggerated opinion of oneself, as a general habit of anthropocene.
The meanings arise one after another while you walk around it and create a sequence.


Insideout / Swollen-head

This is a digital print for my on-going project called "Maybe Our Mother Didn't Want Us".

This project connects the state of our planet to mental state of people. I try to arouse questions like overpopulation, mental health, ecology, immortality, bond between mother and child, regret in  parenthood and others. Full text via link to my web-site

The Rock Mother

This sculpture was made as a part of "Mother of Creeps" exhibition in Zönoteka, Berlin, 2019.

An installation depicting a many-breasted Goddess that symbolises a city of
Berlin that is quite neutral, yet multicultural, accepts everyone and rejects nothing. The form both ancient-old and bathed in red cyber acid. It has all of breasts to feed, although they quite small and holed. Their hands are swapped, so you’d never tell what is right. Though they called a “Mother” a gender isn’t vivid and certain. It’s a state of mind.


Mother B

This work was a part of Trauma&Revival solo exhibition in Moscow, 2017. Exhibition is made in artistic tandem with photographer Vera Barkalova. 

Corporeality is a direct reflection of a person's thoughts, as the attitude toward the
body in culture is a trigger for moods in society. Inheriting the memory of a trauma,
each next generation tries to reborn in a new body.

Full text and installation view via link

Tripod

This is an online interactive game-exhibition created in collaboration with Vera Barkalova. To enter, you only need a PC and a mouse. Follow the purple head to find all objects!

https://vrtim.online/rituality.html

What we create is a collective dream that people fall into by clicking on the site.
The project is dedicated to ritual. The primordial experience, the process without completion, the moment when the ritual is interrupted. Cyclicity associated with rituals, eternal rebirth, reincarnation, symbolic transformation of the action. It can be regularly, but it can also happen only once.

Ritualism takes a common source in all civilizations, and although in our case we mostly work with visual patterns associated with our culture, the basis remains intersecting in all traditions.

Modernity gives particular embodiment of ritual. We decode cultural code with the help of visual art, and extract digital time (here and now) and beingness (timeless).


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Ekaterina Kovalenko