Diana Romanovich "Garden" Automatic translate

Alisa Gallery opens the first solo exhibition of Diana Romanovich "Garden". The exclusion and exile of women became the main motifs of the first part of Romanovich’s great transmedial work, devoted to a retrospective and analysis of the oppression of women, starting with the biblical story of the expulsion of Eve from Paradise.

The image of the "Garden" originated from an image of a tree burned down by a lightning strike from a medieval manuscript of 1430, which described the exile of Adam and Eve. In her project, the artist recreates elements of illustrations by Hildegard of Bingen, a 12th-century nun and proto-feminist. The Gothic forms of the sculptures tell the viewer the fragility and morbidity of the female nature. The red color of the walls enhances this feeling of pain and tension. The space of the installation is formed in the image of a temple altar, which everyone without exception is invited to enter.

The curse placed on Eve in the book of Genesis becomes the first mention of a woman’s connection with Satan and the accusation of expelling people from Paradise. The narrative of The Garden brings back the repressed woman from her "eternal exile to the dark continent", understood as an instilled and internalized fear of the dark since childhood. So, Helen Cixous writes: “The Dark Continent is neither dark nor inaccessible to research. It hasn’t been explored just because we’ve been led to believe it’s too dark to explore.”

Examining medieval documents in detail, the artist rethinks the concepts of witchcraft and witchcraft as protoforms of an anti-capitalist uprising and a symbolic protest against patriarchal power. By studying various aspects of maternal labor, crossed out and destroyed cultural codes, the artist builds her own artistic practice, developing strategies to resist the accelerating structures of capitalism.

Diana Romanovich (@di. romanovich, born in 1986, Novorossiysk) is a multidisciplinary artist from Novorossiysk. Graduated from the Krasnodar University of Culture and Arts. Since 2020, she has been studying at the BAZA Institute of Contemporary Art.

Lives and works in Moscow.

In her practice, the artist turns to the study of the Feminine through the optics of dark ontologies and psychoanalysis. Works with installation, ceramics, metal, painting and sculpture.