Anna Zavileiskaia

AWARDS

1ST, 2D PRICES, HONORABLE MENTION AWARDS IN FINE ART ARCHITECTURE, STILL LIFE, ABSTRACT AND OTHER CATEGORIES:
WPGA Annual Pollux Awards 2011 - United Kingdom
The Center for Fine Art Photography, Fort Collins, USA (permanent collection)
Palm Art Award 2012 - Leipzig, Germany
Black and White spider Awards 2012 - USA-United Kingdom
Monochrome Photography Awards - 2014 - USA, United Kingdom
IPA 2012 - International Photography Awards, Los Angeles, USA
IPA 2014 - International Photography Awards, Los Angeles, USA
IPA 2016 - International Photography Awards, Los Angeles, USA
LICC 2012 - London International Creative Competition, United Kingdom
The Center for Fine Art Photography, Fort Collins, USA (permanent collection)

Some posters for solo expositions

“When, in the year 1913, in my desperate attempt to free art from the ballast of objectivity, I took refuge in the square form and exhibited a picture which consisted of nothing more than a black square on a white field. The critics and, along with them, the public sighed, ‘Everything which we loved was lost. We are in a desert...’” Without Malevich, it would be impossible to understand Anna Zavileiskaia’s conscious, systematic, yet playful effort of image-making. The famous, if overused, statement offers an inspirational perspective, a plane (cf. desert) on which to construct an interpretation of the work of a visual artist who is a qualified architect. Her closest spiritual kin and predecessors are those Central and East Central European photographers (the Czech Jaroslav Rössler, Jaromír Funke and Josef Sudek, the Hungarian László Moholy-Nagy and André Kertész, and the photographers of the Russian avant-garde, Rodchenko and Klutsis) who accelerated the development of the new medium when instead of accurately representing reality—instead of arresting the fleeting moment—consciously turned away from reality, and created “objectless,” storyless images. Or perhaps their photos are not without objects: like Anna Zavileiskaia’s images, they distort or reconstruct the functions and meanings of objects. The image itself is built from everyday, personal articles. Cups, tennis balls, fans, folded sheets of paper and metal rods are transformed. She employs simple image-making techniques, ones brought out by photography itself, like magnification and the use of shadows. The gesture of removing or relativizing function is questioning the functionality fetish of our world. The gesture is performed as much by the photographer as by the architect, because the fictitious spaces built (the photos) define built space as an illusion, a projection of our imagination. Yet, the chief characteristic of the transformation of the everyday objects is not the logic of Malevich; what matters most is not that they are reduced to elementary forms or signs, but the fact that they leave behind their original functions and become freely variable. The procedure is more reminiscent of utopias and the world of science fiction. A space base, or the “isle of delight,” is produced by the transformation of experiences someone has had, of objects already used, and is visualized with the use of distorted images. This is what the photographer does. Yet this is no mere abstraction; the point is not condensation, but image-making as a game, as a principle of endless variation. To be part of the game, of creation: this is Zavileiskaia’s natural element. She first experiments with the objects, and when she has fully explored the physical environment, the possibilities of colours and forms—has, in other words, finished describing nature—, she goes on to study, and teach about, human psyche. She writes a “psychological novel” with her photos. Like the great novelists of the 19th century, she seeks to remain objective, and attains this end by making very simple figures. Her working method is filmic, resembles most early animation techniques. She makes miniature sculptures, or rather, installations, carved from paper. Employing simple gestures, she photographs the carefully staged situations which she has placed in a space that is full of light and shadows, is fictitious and unrealistic, yet imitative of reality. Her method simultaneously intensifies realism and unrealism, as she pushes her figure here and there on the borderline between the two. While she strives to bring to life real times of the day with artificial lighting, she keeps calling out of the image, questioning and sharply demarcating fiction and reality.
Gabriella Uhl
art historian
Kazimir Malevich: The Non-Objective World: The Manifesto of Suprematism (1926). Trans.: Howard Dearstyne. Courier Dover Publications, 2003, p. 68.

Anna Zavileiskaïa was born in Moscow and graduated from the Moscow Architectural Institute (State Academy). She currently lives and works in Budapest and is a member of the Hungarian Chamber of Architects. Her photography has been exhibited in solo and group shows in Belgium, Hungary, Italy, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Argentina and the USA.