Anastasiya Yarovenko. height width length

16.03.2019 - 17.05.2019

MAM Mario Mauroner Contemporary Art, Wien, Wien / Österreich

Measurements determine norms - norms that define the space humans are claiming, is what Anastasiya Yarovenko is focussing on. With the exhibition height width length the artist is approaching the idea and the concept of the norm in society. Even though standardized and universalized values are repeatedly negotiated, all systems finally rely on them. In this contradictory field of tension, the artist attempts re-measuring the exhibition space herself.

In the room the visitor is invited to mark his own height and gets immediately encouraged to engage with what follows.... In a three-part series of perspex objects “Untitled (crossed-legged)”, “Untitled (between walls)” and “Untitled (in movement)” Yarovenko explores the space occupied by a human body in certain positions, referring on Ernst Neufert and his spatial studies. With a woven piece “Untitled (Minus One)” the beholder views a seemingly arranged pattern, that on a second view reveals to be a potential

formation of faceless heads in a confined area dispersing into disorder. With this work the artist picks up what is immanent to the norm: Standardisation through the process of anonymization.

Visible as well in the choice of material Yarovenko reduces forms and shapes, free of exceeded details, often uses transparent, uni coloured synthetics and once again underlines a turn away from the singular to the plural.

In a further installation white, semi transparent, cone-shaped objects are zipped together to a sprawling structure, each set of

elements, composed of the average volume of 0,0664 cubic meters - such as the human body could be. Here by adding, subtracting and the overlapping of similar but still different elements, the artists elevates the sculptures to a floating state of aggregation. It is the “Liquid Times” that Zygmunt Bauman addresses in his book of the same title, that influences the artist’s approach: Common accepted understandings and volumes and their principles are shifted and unstable.

But also growing up herself in a post-soviet Ukraine, where the artist’s father was sewing children’s clothes for economical reasons always a few sizes plus and a latent feeling of being exposed in a destabilized society, in subliminal change between subjective and collective identity, feeds into Yarovenko’s works.

height width length is speaking of the “being norm-al” and of this term, that is constantly used to describe our world, but to the same extent is narrowing down and sorting it. That the society and metric systems are not free of norms, is fortified here once again. The exhibition uncovers that normalizing physical and cognitive space means equally to set its limits. But also, that only their disclosure enables to break them down.

Anastasiya Yarovenko was awarded 2015 with the Prize of the Kunsthalle Wien. In 2016 Anastasiya Yarovenko received the prestigious MAK-Schindler Stipend and realizing the “60 Gallon” project in Los Angeles. Yarovenko lives and works in Vienna, she has exhibited internationally in Sweden, Turkey, Hungary, Germany and the US. Her work has been shown at the 6th Biennial of Contemporary Art in Moscow and the Kyiv Biennial - the School of Kyiv in 2015, amongst others.

[Quelle: www.galerie-mama.com]