Marina Black
Biography
Marina Black is a Russian-born, Canada-based visual artist. She was originally trained as a painter and also studied Russian History. Upon moving to Canada she became interested in photography and installation. Her photo-based installation work incorporates cinematic narrative and both her photography and drawing include references to history, mythology and identity. Outside of her personal practice, Marina teaches photography and arts to adults and children in art centers and in a variety of non-profit organizations. At the moment she is pursuing her graduate studies in York University in Toronto. Her personal work has been exhibited locally and internationally. She has received support from the Ontario Arts Council. Her images are held in private collections in Canada.
GALLERY REPRESENTATION: KWT contemporary , Toronto, Canada http://www.kwtcontemporary.com/
Artist’s Statement
14 METERS TO THE DAYLIGHT SURFACE (ДО ДНЕВНОЙ ПОВЕРХНОСТИ 14 МЕТРОВ)
In collaboration with IZOLYATSIA Platform for cultural initiatives, Donetsk, Ukraine, 2011. Curated by Boris Mikhailov
Dedicated to my father.
"Fascination is a defence against loss" -"On promises, promises" - Adam Philips.
"This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity."
-"The Myth of Sisyphus" Albert Camus.
I am pronouncing her name one more time, Nastya, Nastya, Nasten'ka… She is 16, turning 17 soon, just like my son. But I am not envious of her youth, or of who she is now, for she offered me a chance to travel in time to the place where my father was born. To imagine time's arrow reversed, tracing the course of my life when I was 16 year-old, long ago, living in Soviet Moscow, and also of my father when he was 16, just as he left Ukraine for Russia to study in St. Petersburg. In this city of my return, I skipped the archives and the museums. Instead, I am where he could have lived, walked along these streets, visited these buildings that are now abandoned, lost and ruined. It's a phantom-limb effect. I feel his time running through my bones. My father was born in Ukraine and I in Russia, and we both grew up in the Soviet Union, a country that no longer exists. Ukraine or Russia, Moldova or Georgia. These titles didn't matter for me at the time, but all of a sudden they matter now. Is that an attempt to find an authentic self? I lived convinced that I had one but then I realized that there was no such thing. I am a only nomad now who will never find her home. The same is true for Nastya. She is haunted by my and my father's past or rather her country's past. She blends into the detritus of the environment like a maladroit tyro ghost, camouflaging her body, disappearing. She surrenders to the weight we all bear. Can you? Words are easy to make and often carelessly used but our bodies, like markers on some days, reminders. "Is it really all that different now?" - I wonder, listening to her talk, watching her, bending for this shot, her hair flowing with the summer wind. She happened to be born in the time of "in between". Although she belongs to a new generation of Ukrainians, she is still tyrannized by an absence of our soviet gods and laws and implications. Instead, she creates her own. "Is there anyone else here?" she would look around with a concern in her eyes when we would inspect a new place for a shoot. "Who do you mean?" I would ask. "The ghosts", she would reply quietly, hiding her blushing face, patiently working with me in all these "haunted" buildings. Despite her fear, she surrenders, bows to all the good and bad that life brings. Traveling in time is an acquiescence to all that cannot be changed. A bit like dying, a giving into. Nastya and I went through this together "lost in the space/time", visible/invisible, like all travellers, fragmented from our lives: time-traveler and emigrant. How does one's body react to this new reality? How to establish the dialogue woven between the past that is still affecting us and the "suspended" reality of the shift of the last 20 years? To bend, to surrender? How is that some pleasures don't make us happy, and some pains do? I had won an IZOLYATSIA Fellowship and was invited, along with eight other international photographers, to create a story about Donetsk, an industrial city in Eastern Ukraine. We were asked to create a story about the city that would reflect how we felt and experienced it. I was drawn to the desolated areas of Donetsk as if they were marks, traces of migrations left behind: fugitive evidence. There were lots of 'phantom" buildings and empty spaces in this mining city, and I kept returning to them. In the end, most of the images from the series where shot in these abandoned environments. But was this story really about Donetsk? I was looking for the lights that would signal my way back home; the evidence I sought was one less of substance than of an attempt, the search itself rather than in the finding. There is a certain painful pleasure in not-knowing what will happen. Things might look displaced and 'odd' when you an outsider, they become a sounding. How to navigate the path between the soul-less contours of a place and homelessness? How to reconstruct the points of landing to a place that was once called "home". We are all outsiders and yet there is also this: to feel at a loss and yet still go looking.
