Issuu

Aya Alexandra Demina’s practice is formed within the space between several cultural and symbolic regimes. As an artist of Chuvash origin who has spent recent years living outside Russia, she turns to her own biography as a territory where processes of migration, cultural memory, loss, and the construction of identity intersect.

Paradoxically, it is distance itself that becomes the condition for proximity in the artist’s work.

A culture that had existed in her life more as a fragment, a suggestion, or a silence becomes accessible for reflection only through the experience of emigration. Outside the national context, identity ceases to function as something given and instead becomes a subject of search, reconstruction, and imagination. In this sense, Demina’s works do not simply document cultural heritage, but rather trace the very process of its re-production.

Textile occupies a particularly important place in her practice. Thread functions here not merely as a material, but as a model of memory. It reconnects interrupted biographical lines, links individual experience with collective history, and creates the possibility for encounters between different times and spaces. This metaphor also carries a deeply personal dimension for the artist: the history of her family is connected to weaving, and many of the materials used in her works were given to her by people from different countries and communities. In this way, fabric becomes a site where multiple human trajectories intersect.

The works presented in the exhibition encompass several stages of Aya Demina’s artistic journey: pieces created before emigration, during her time in Armenia, and after her move to France. Together, they form not so much a retrospective as a map of a gradually shifting perspective. In each new context, the artist reconstructs the relationship between herself and a cultural heritage that never exists as a complete or fixed entity, but is constantly reassembled in response to the conditions of the present.

An important dimension of this process is a decolonial perspective. By engaging with the culture of the Chuvash people — one of the many Indigenous peoples of Russia — the artist explores not only the mechanisms of preserving memory, but also the consequences of its historical displacement. Yet this is not an attempt to restore some lost authenticity. On the contrary, Demina’s works demonstrate that any identity emerges within a space of translation, rupture, and dissonance. Memory appears not as an archive of fixed meanings, but as a living process of their continual production.

Within this context, weaving emerges not as an appeal to tradition in its museumified sense, but as a practice of creating relations. Each work becomes a site of encounter between different histories, voices, and experiences. It is precisely in this capacity to create connections — between people, generations, and cultures — that the political and poetic potential of Aya Alexandra Demina’s art resides.

Vladimir Shalamov, Curator of Prometheus project