ABSTRACT
One of the first memories of my childhood is of my father’s paintings, in which he tried to describe some kind of worldwide catastrophe – anthropogenic, I believe. Grey skies, enormou s, deserted, unpopulated spaces. Only tumbledown buildings, still impressive in their greatness, remind us that this wreckage was once a stronghold of an unknown powerful state. Now I understand that my father’s post-apocalyptic fantasies reflected very precisely the public mood of that time. I should mention that my childhood fell during a very complicated period in the history of Russia. The huge utopia called USSR was rapidly collapsing; it was a time of ruins. I believe that my fascination with utopias and dystopias (in my case feminist), and subsequently my little post-apocalyptic world that I try to describe in my artworks, grew out of these memories of my father’s paintings and also reminiscences of my hometown Ufa, the centre of Russia’s chemical and engineering industry situated somewhere in the wilds between Moscow and Siberia.
