DAGNINI

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Dagnini is an interdisciplinary artist based in Moscow. She works with dynamic performances, creates objects, installations, paintings, and drawings. In her practice, Dagnini explores “glitches” both in the digital space and in reality. She is interested in the situations where status quo, peace, and routine are breached, and often uses irony to show their failures.

Recommended by Lizaveta Matveeva

Summit, 2020. This project, realised at the digital exhibition I Don’t Know Whether the Earth Is Spinning or Not…, brought together different performances by the artist. Curators: Lizaveta Matveeva, Francesca Altamura. 7th Moscow Biennale for Young Art

Opera Diva. First appeared during lockdown, when she sang an opera aria in the shower. Not really having an ear for music, she loves drama, nudity, and being in the spotlight

Gargoyle. First appeared in a nostalgic project Red List of Heroes of Might and Magic, where mythical creatures merged with people from disappearing subcultures of the 90s. Dagnini often combines poetic images of the past with low-brow contemporary culture

Peep Show. Here, Dagnini deconstructs viewer’s perception and expectation of a human (specifically female) body

Peep Show: home edition. Lockdown version of Peep Show

Two characters in one: Russian Salad Pea and Rainbow Spring. Both festive images, they are nonetheless stuck, alluding to our frustration that can tend to around the holidays

Witness from Fryazino. A meme character known as “witness from Fryazino” merges with an image from a booklet distributed by Jehovah’s Witnesses in the 90s Russia

Traffic Light. This image comes from a rural celebration where guests started getting on each other’s shoulders. Here, green stands for creative sublimation, yellow—for viewer’s attention, and red—for suppression and frustration

Watchwoman. Based on a typical image of a Russian museum guard, the Watchwoman appears at events that require additional surveillance and protection of cultural values

Lion of Venice. Appeared at the Performance Regarding the Venice Issue during the 7th International Cultural Forum (Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, 2019). The lion was caught and placed on a pedestal among couture bags, but soon ran away

Pirate and Mermaid. An allusion to a 90s song describing a dolphin’s unrequited love of a dolphin for a mermaid, this performance brings a pirate and a mermaid together

Mask. Here, the Mask or Fantômas from the eponymous films merge with a squatting gopnik

New East Digital Archive