Nastya Kuzmina is a multimedia artist who works with video art, performance, and video installation.
She graduated from major one of the art school russian—the Rodchenko Art School in the ‘Photography, Sculpture, Video’ program. In 2016, she took part in the educational program in contemporary dance and performance SOTA@Garage laboratory by Dina Khuseyn. She creates site-specific installations, interventions, and total video installations. Her experiments also involve herself as an object of study.
Today the focus of her interest is the polarity of the world, vulnerability, and the theme of crossing between different emotional states of a person—the theme of identities through self-expression and growing up as an adult.
She explores the body’s possibilities (also by means of dance), and she creates projects in which she appeals to viewers and their emotional experiences. The works are in the collection in private collections, MMCA, MMOMA.
She now lives and works in Paris.
Residency project:
"Telling the Bees": video, performance, installation
The video shows a ritual meal scene in which people are very sad. They are sitting at a table in the countryside. It's like a show in which they act out their sadness. The table is very copious, it's a festive meal, with flowers. People get together and talk about the world's big problems. They speak different languages but still understand each other. But as they eat, they feel very sad.
Then they reach out to touch the bees, as if to express their sadness. This gesture is part of an ancient tradition whereby the bees were to be informed of deaths in the family. It was believed that the bees might fall ill or leave if the information was not shared with them.