Yelena Popova (born in 1978 in Ozersk, USSR, lives and works in Nottingham) is a graduate of the Moscow Art Theater School (2000), Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design (2007) and the Royal College of Art in London (2011), where she completed a master's degree in painting. She benefited from numerous scholarships and awards. Among them, The Outset Prize, London (2011), The Arts Council Grant (2014) and the Fellowship of the Girton College (2016-2017). Numerous important collections hold works by Popova. Most notably, the Westphalian State Museum of Art and Culture in Münster and the Zabludowicz and Saatchi Collections in London.
Read MoreYelena Popova's work is always concerned with socio-political content, which she casts into artistic form after extensive research into the historical background and contexts. Accordingly, she works with very different media. While some topics are dealt with in video films, she also creates computer performances, sculptures, installations, drawings or – since a few years – tapestries for other contents. For all groups of works, she also does paintings, which have their own particular connection to the overarching themes, although – as it seems at first glance – they are abstract works formally related to Russian Modernism and Constructivism (one can think of Lubov Popova or Natalia Goncharova when seeing these canvases).
The decision for or against a particular technique depends on the respective content. Popova began with a duo of two art-documentary video works that revolved around her original hometown of Ozersk, in the former USSR, and its status as a secret nuclear energy research site. In other video works, she dealt with the themes of "coal mining" or "time." The theme of "money" and its circuits and functions were mirrored in an elaborate computer performance and tapestry, and atomic energy in a second group of works on this theme, with a large installation and again tapestries. A guiding principle of these investigations and their products is that it is not so much a documentary approach that Popova takes as one in which she seeks aesthetically compelling forms to confront us with the subjects and stimulate reflection.
A guiding principle of these investigations and their products is that it is not so much a documentary approach that Popova takes, but one in which she seeks aesthetically compelling forms to confront us with the issues and provoke reflection.
Text courtesy Osnova gallery.
