When he connects via video call, Gluklya is in Amsterdam, the city where he now lives and works. In the background, a series of Ukrainian flags descend from the ceiling. Considered a pioneer of performance art and feminist activism in Russia, Natalia Pershina-Yakimanskaya, aka Gluklya, looks back on a long career of exhibitions all over the world, one of the most recent being at the Artissima fair in Turin .
His art is based on performance, and the key element is the clothes. You co-founded the artist collective ‘The Factory of Found Clothes’, which uses ‘conceptual clothes’ to explore the relationship, the ‘boundary’, as Gluklya calls it, between human beings and society. “With clothes we want to change, find something that identifies us, represent us in the world,” she explains.
Dress against the trend
His most famous works are clothes hanging on hangers. The intent is to make the cloth masks with which we cover ourselves “like a uniform” invisible and to make visible the “sublime, the essence of human beings, what is important to achieve in art and at the same time what clothes usually conceal”. And it’s a very feminist concept, because “looking beyond appearances also means opposing the commercialization of bodies proposed by capitalist industry, which is sexist and chauvinist”, explains Gluklya, “that’s why mine are dressed against fashion , they are utopian clothes».
The idea of hanging clothes actually comes from a very concrete need. Taking part in demonstrations in Russia, he needed to show them: for this reason he placed them on hangers, high up.
2012, St. Petersburg. Photo of the protests over the “false election of Vladimir Putin” from the Gluklya website
For her, these clothes represent a critique of a certain way of seeing society. And they also want to reflect on the capitalist fashion industry, made up of «exploitation and slavery». «One of the stories that struck me the most – the artist says – is that of the Rana Plaza, in Bangladesh». In 2013, an eight-story commercial building collapsed, killing 1,134 people in a textile factory that the owners had refused to close. More than half of the victims were women, along with a number of their children who were in “company crèches” within the building. “I was deeply moved by that episode,” Gluklya recalls.
Life in Russia and artists on the side of the weak
In her life, feminism, activism and art intertwine like the threads of a dense plot, difficult to untie. The reflection that she now explores with artistic maturity has actually been present in her since she was a child. «I was alone in the motherland – she says – when I started talking to clothes, playing with them, imagining stories. Certainly the fact that my research was born in Russia, together with me, plays a role – she explains – for various reasons. First of all, it is a very patriarchal country. Then in the post perestroika everything was ideological, political; people hated the fact that we wanted to delve into individuality, fathom pain, suffering, problems », she says.
“I remember, for example, when my colleagues and I learned the story of a girl who drowned herself in St. Petersburg. And we decided to pay homage to her: we jumped from the same bridge, into the cold water, wearing black clothes». In 2002, in the years in which Putin came to power for the first time, Glukya and his collective of colleagues decided to write the manifesto ‘Artists on the side of the weak’, “to reaffirm our role as artists”. explains. All actions that were not well received.
«In 2014 I left Russia, not only for personal reasons, but also because various political problems made it urgent to change my life. There was no support for my art,” she recounts.
Criticism of the war in Ukraine
The images on her site offer a glimpse of her activism between the present and the past. From the Manifesto of the Utopian Union of Unemployment to the photos of the protests for the “false election of Vladimir Putin”. But also the book “Two diaries”, in collaboration with the Kurdish activist Murad Zorava, born from the respective periods lived in Bijlmerbajes, a former prison transformed into a refugee center on the edge of Amsterdam, in 2017: in a tower of the prison complex, Gluklya then had his own studio; in the other, Murad lived through his asylum process in the Netherlands.
And then the criticism of the war, which has seen various outfits in the streets in support of Ukraine and for peace. “What do I think artists can do to oppose war? First of all, stay clear headed and don’t fall into hysteria, as many of us did when it all began. Every artist is different, and he decides according to his own nature what he can do. For my part, I chose not to be concerned about declaring my clear anti-war position, even if it means risking never seeing my mother again. Which is tragic.”