11 Questions with Alisa Aistova - Magazine Issue02

Alisa Aistova selected and featured artist in Al-Tiba9 magazine ISSUE02, interviewed by Mohamed Benhadj about her artistic research.

Alisa Aistova investigates human boundaries and transitional states, mutations, injuries, and suppressed desires. In the center of her work, there are always transformations, mental and physiological. Insanity, psychic transformation, obsessive neurosis, melancholy, rejection, anguish, fear, loneliness, violence, isolation, death and the desire for it.

Please describe the intention behind your art. How do you successfully express this intention?

I’m really curious about the transformation of the human psyche. It is thrilling for me to investigate the state of the psyche when it is transformed under the influence of some factors leading to severe conditions and to investigate everything that may be associated with this. How loneliness distorts our consciousness: the consequences of social isolation, etc. The questions I work with are largely personal, tabooed, or ignored - I want to draw attention to them. It is my personal quest to encounter and study and learn from the Shadow, as Carl Gustav Jung would call it. My intention is to contemplate myself and help others to fully comprehend these states of mind.

Can you talk a little about your formative years as an artist?

Inspired by Bacon, Duchamp, and Picasso I immersed myself in an open and experimental fine art photographic practice, striving to compare and explore the relationship within an image, in an attempt to create a feeling. I’ve devoted almost all of my work to the study of human boundaries and transitional states, mutations, injuries, and suppressed desires. Now I’m learning art at London Central Saint Martins College.

Your work is about a mental transformation of a person, their internal state and work with the unspoken, an attempt to visualize internal psychological conditions and heavy feelings. It is a very deep research into oneself. What inspired this artistic expression?

My personal experiences, I guess, but I believe that’s true for any artist. I was lucky or unlucky enough to have some extreme and traumatic experiences in my life, which I always tried to make sense of in order to figure out the way to live with them and independent of them. It’s a really interesting question – if some experience in my life alters my internal state, it brings overwhelming emotions. My way is to link experiences, perceptions, and emotions.

Where did you get your imagery from (What, If any, Sources did you use)?

In a general, I get inspiration from my favorite artists and directors as I consume dozens of books and hours of world’s cinematographic classics every month – an important influence on the project was provided by the films of Van Sant and Bella Tarr. My recent inspirations come from artists such as Eva Hesse, Parajanov who is not a director in ordinary words, but a "modern artist", an actionist, Munch, Frida, Boyce, Naumann, Bourgeois, and many others.

You pose a number of interesting questions to the audience; how does the social environment shape us, how does our personality form tension with the environment? How is our psyche transformed by the state of an obsessive neurosis? This questioning can be disturbing for the viewer – as if you would keep a deep feeling hidden behind your personal life experience and project it then on the viewer. Can you talk about this complex process?

There is indeed a lot of personality in my works due to the fact that I am my study object. Ultimately, I believe every artist first explores himself. So I try to look at processes in my mind in an honest and detached way. In Russia, from where I'm from, there is a strong tradition to avoid and deny open and transparent discussions of psychological problems. In order to integrate socially, I have to deny or hide everything, if I attend therapy or fight depression. The Situation changes slowly among the well-educated young generation, but it's a minor fraction of society and there is still a long way to go. This state of affairs troubles me and generates my protest. I want to communicate through my works with the viewers. I don't aim to bring beauty and harmony to my audience but to disturb, make aware of the viewers’ internal states and feelings.

Your process includes documentation, advertising, personal remembering, public image, the object of expression. In other works, you experiment with a mix of video art and photography to give a 3-dimensional shape to the mental side of your artistic productions. How can you describe that for our readers?

My work is more like arrangements than pictures in the conventional sense of the word, and it is both a tool and a research object. The expressive capabilities of photography are also in my focus - how putting the picture in a different context gives it different meanings. 

my paintings made me seriously contemplate whether my auxiliary method is really my main method. I also use my photographs a lot as sketches, as a basis for reflection and inspiration. I consider the widest applications of images and materials that focus on photography, documentation, advertising, memory, public image, the object of expression, and then ask how these tools affect our perception of photographic art. I also use projectors to add additional layering in the creation of the object.

Was performance art an influence on your work or the way in which it was made?

Yes, sure. I constantly feel the need to go beyond 2D to create my first installation. As part of my previous research, I attended a performative theater performance using screens and portable projectors to create a video or shoot live.

They say if you could be anything but an artist, don’t be an artist. What career are you neglecting right now by being an artist?

I was a successful headhunter and IT manager in IT space in Russia, But nothing has the same importance and meaning for me as my art and being an artist. Not even close.

What is your favorite genre of music to listen to while painting?

Depends on my mood, oftentimes it’s some brit-pop, Muse, for example, or something like Paul Oakenfold’s old tracks.

What current series are you working on?

I’m working on a project with Eugene Protasenko about philosophy and studies of the brain, consciousness and neurochemical foundations of human behavior. This project is an intersection of science and art.

Do you have any upcoming shows or collaborations?

Yes, sure! I participated in the Moscow International Biennale of Young Art which ended recently. The closest upcoming events are two exhibitions in Italy in Rome and Liguria and the autumn projects of Moscow Museum of Contemporary Art. I’m also curating my personal project, which hopefully will be announced and shown in 2019.