Polina Surovova

Polina Surovova is

• member of the union of art TSCHR

• member of the union of art MSCH

• The winner of the prize of Zurab Ceretely (2018)

"My art explores the reflection of ancient culture in modern human. The subject of my research is mysticism in a world of instability. I also explore how the body and the natural are transformed in digital culture. I work with ancient myths and fairy tales of the peoples of the world. I have a special interest in Slavic mythology. In painting techniques I work with images of other worlds. Part of my method is the use of digital technologies as a tool for interacting with the non‑human space. Baudrillard developed ideas of the digital world as part of rality, the hyperreal, more real than the world of objects. I am fascinated by the matter and textures generated by digital images. The loss of quality of photos, glitches, what we call mistakes, for me reveals the beauty of matter.

I am looking for the balance between beautiful and disgusting. Russian culturologist Ulia Kristeva, in her book «The force of horror: essay about disgust» explains how disgust transform in beauty: different forms of clearing modification from disgust – different forms of catharsis – and constitute history of religion and finish in art that represents catharsis at the highest level» Monstrouos appears on the border between human and onhuman.

I experiment with neural networks in search of an image of a chthonic creature. Working with images of ancient fairy tales and myths, I needed a method of creating images with the participation of something non human, I needed a tool with which I could distance the human hand from the object being created. Neural networks turned out to be an ideal portal to the world of digital materia. What interests me is precisely the elusive imprint of the essence and matter of digital space, which I can get from there. Therefore, neural networks are //one of the stages of work for me, but I create the final physical object. "