It is with the ups and downs of life, its setbacks and small successes, that the video installation Shopping with Family (2013) also deals. As a preparation for cancer treatment, the artist accompanied by her family is buying a wig. Jermolaewa changes her appearance while trying on all kind of wigs and receives feedback from her family. The slapstick mode of this gender performance lets us forget its tragic component – the artist’s sickness.

The multi-media installation Methods of Social Resistance on Russian Examples (2012) shows the impressive plurality of creative methods of resistance that are used against the Russian authorities. With the installation Untitled (Gulag) (2012), the artist takes us on a journey to the past. We follow her into the middle of nowhere researching her family history, as some of its members were dispossessed and deported to the camp region of Perm. Maria Alyokhina, a political activist of the punk band Pussy Riot, served her sentence in this region until she was set free in December 2013 in the course of an amnesty prior to the Olympic Games in Sochi. “The Gulag is a timeless concept”, says Jermolaewa.

In some of the artworks that were created over the last twenty years, animals play a crucial role, as in Untitled (Hermitage Cats) (2013) which has cats as protagonists. In a 1745 verdict, Russia’s Tsarina Elisabeth ordered an abundance of cats from Kazan to protect the State Hermitage. After more than 250 years, the Hermitage in St. Petersburg still employs an army of cats who live there as service workers.

Very often, banal and trivial scenes that Jermolaewa observes in her own life and the everyday become the point of departure for her projects, as in Step Aside (2008) and Trying to Survive (2000). “These scenes serve as metaphors for social and political processes”, the artist puts it.

Jermolaewa also presents three new works that were created for the exhibition at Zachęta. Once again, there is a feature on animals as workers: in this case, the role of goats when it comes to the production of argan oil in Morocco. Remaining two works deal with the conformity experiments developed by Solomon Eliot Asch, an American Gestalt psychologist of Polish origin, and the Soviet psychologist Valeria Mukhina, who analyzes the impact of suggestion on human choices.

Anna Jermolaewa, born in 1970 in St. Petersburg, has been living and working in Vienna since 1989.

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