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Taus Makhacheva

  • Taus Makhacheva’s performance and video works critically examine what happens when different cultures, traditions come into contact with one another. If her work cannot be restricted to one medium or conceptual gesture – flowing between media work, sculpture and performance – a playful sense of irony and satire characterise her approach to art making. Having grown up in Moscow with cultural origins in the Caucasus region of Dagestan and having studied in the UK, her artistic practice is informed by these personal connections with the co-existing worlds of pre and post Sovietisation and a consciousness of the specificities of the art world. Tightrope (2015), her internationally praised video presented at the 2017 Venice Biennale, featured a tightrope walker carrying 61 copies of work from the collection of the Dagestan Museum of Fine Art across a precipitous Caucasus ravine, commenting on the dangers of cultural amnesia and the fragile state of local artistic institutions. By setting up her works in the dry landscape of Dagestan and evoking regional tales and traumas, the artist softly touches upon larger issues of power, memory and cultural transitions, continuously questioning through irony her own legitimacy and capacity to address political questions.

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Taus Makhacheva

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Taus Makhacheva’s performance and video works critically examine what happens when different cultures, traditions come into contact with one another. If her work cannot be restricted to one medium or conceptual gesture – flowing between media work, sculpture and performance – a playful sense of irony and satire characterise her approach to art making. Having grown up in Moscow with cultural origins in the Caucasus region of Dagestan and having studied in the UK, her artistic practice is informed by these personal connections with the co-existing worlds of pre and post Sovietisation and a consciousness of the specificities of the art world. Tightrope (2015), her internationally praised video presented at the 2017 Venice Biennale, featured a tightrope walker carrying 61 copies of work from the collection of the Dagestan Museum of Fine Art across a precipitous Caucasus ravine, commenting on the dangers of cultural amnesia and the fragile state of local artistic institutions. By setting up her works in the dry landscape of Dagestan and evoking regional tales and traumas, the artist softly touches upon larger issues of power, memory and cultural transitions, continuously questioning through irony her own legitimacy and capacity to address political questions.