All author's works
Soul Struggle
Alisa Gil turns to photography to project and document the stages of collective spiritual practice. Starting from eschatological iconography, images of Heaven, the Last Judgment and the Garden of Earthly Delights, as well as the author’s own structural constructions by means of photography, she has created a project for a future three-part performance. Urban spaces are to become platforms for a series of performances: a museum as paradise, a business loft as a judicial platform, and nature as a place of hedonism. In this way, the artist integrates urban and spiritual topographies on a metaphorical level. Gil plans to involve cultural figures in her performances, the focus of which will be a psycho-emotional transformation. As a result she will create three photographs, each of which will be frescoed on a wall.
The series “Soul Struggle” precedes the performances: these images will illustrate key concepts in their conceptual model and reproduce forms of collective organization that will become their basis.
Man
as Material
In 2014, “Man as Material”, a collective exhibition bringing together more than a dozen young artists, took place in the Annenkirche, (St Petersburg’s first Lutheran church). Alisa Gil presented a series of photographs reflecting the dual nature of human beings as a subject and object of its creative act. Endowed with free will, man is nevertheless firmly embedded in the fabric of society, in its cultural, social and political infrastructure. With the ability to create, he feels himself to be a point of application of different and multidirectional forces. The multi-figured compositions constructed by the artist from human bodies underline this dual status.
Especially the interior of the church, which was destroyed in a fire in 2002. The artist printed black and white prints on transparent foil and hung them in front of windows in the aisle. Permeated by sunlight, the works take on an abstract quality and play whimsically with mystical experience in the context of religious architecture.
