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Anastasia Mleko

Anastasia Mleko (b. Shchyolkovo, Moscow region) – is a Moscow-based software engineer, artist and photographer. studied at Rodchenko Art School (Moscow) (workshop of Sergei Bratkov) and Moscow Studio for Experimental Sound and Multimedia Technologies – Sound Artist
Work with encompasses installation, sculpture and research
In her works explores the possibility of overcoming the modernist oppositions of natural and cultural, analogue – digital, material – semiotic, etc. And also engaged in rethinking the creative process in the same category of overcoming oppositions: where used to be a metaphorical transference — combinatorics is arising, and the aesthetic object is transforming into knowledge.
Lives and works in Moscow.

  • 2020 – 21 – Workshop “Aerocene Laboratory”, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia.
  • 2013 – Residency at the European Academy of Art in Brittany, Rennes, France
  • 2012 – art residence in the art park “Nikola-Lenivets”, Kaluga region, Russia

Group exhibitions:

  • 2020 – “The Giredmet experiences” the former building of the Research Institute Giredmet. Moscow, Russia.
  • 2020 – “Spring of Dream or Nightmare”. ZIL Cultural Center. Moscow, Russia.
  • 2014 – “I saw the lightning”. “Udarnik” cinema. Moscow, Russia.
  • 2013 – “VDNKh-Voronka”. European Academy of Art in Brittany. Rennes, France.
  • 2012 – “Simulants”. Nikola-Lenivets, Russia.

All author's works

Series
DNA Expression
Of The Beaver
Reaches
the edge of its dam

Ecological issues and their connection to human psychology are at the center of Nastya Mleko’s photographic essay. In biology, gene expression is a process at the molecular level that underlies evolutionary changes in an organism. Figuratively speaking, the artist polemically juxtaposes this creativity of nature itself with human creativity, inviting the viewer to be more sensitive to those processes which lie outside the sphere of human sensory experience but directly predetermine it. As the artist puts it: “It is possible that mental health and ecological ‘health’ are linked, and people are deeply traumatized by the fact that they have severed their ties with non-human beings – ties that are preserved in the depths of our bodies (such as in our DNA). We have severed these ties in social and philosophical space, but they still persist, like the thoughts we think are impossible and that seep into our nightmares.” The way out, she suggests, could be ecopsychotherapy: trying to think of ourselves as part of the biosphere and overcome the psychological complexes associated with it.

Series
Terroir
monotown

Following Bruno Latour, Nastya Mleko uses terroir as a metaphor that allows us to look at a certain territory not just as a landscape, but as the result of a profound interaction between man and nature, a combination of the natural and the artificial. In monotowns, these opposites fuse into a disharmonious, unreliable unity. According to Mleko, they are akin to diseased outgrowth, and a product produced by such terroirs is like poisoned fruit. At the same time, they have a fatal effect on the environment. The landscape of single-industry towns from the Far North to the South Caucasus is unified and often ignores or over time levels out the specifics of the natural landscape. According to the artist: “Its products are depressive sinkholes in the bottoms of quarries, domes of muddy industrial water, rivers completely changing their water supply, kilometers of airborne dust, viscous deserts of slagheaps and sprawling neoplasms in the bodies of local people. <...> a single-industry town is an infrastructure unit teetering on the brink of crisis and supported by an antibiotic of state subsidies.”