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MARINA BELIKOVA
(b. in Moscow, Russia. Lives and works in Berlin.)
Marina Belikova is an award-winning Berlin based media artist, working with artist collaborations, 2D animation, UI & graphic design, motion design, video postproduction, photography and other visuals.
In 2012-2013 she completed an M.A. in Communication Design at Kingston University, London and in 2016 she graduated from the Bauhaus University, Weimar with an M.A. in Media Art and Design, specializing in oil-on-glass animation techniques and creating “The Astronaut’s journal” as her graduation project. Marina animates her narratives through the traditional technique, where each frame is painted individually and subsequently captured with a camera as stop motion animation.
Belikova has 10+ years of experience in the field of art and design, having worked for Crazy Panda Games, MOMENTUM Berlin, LemonOne (now BOOM!), various art and freelance projects, and is one of the organisers and producers of the Factual Animation Film Festival.
She also works with photography and mixed media, exploring the topics of human memories and interaction between people and urban spaces. Her award-winning animations have been screened at numerous film festivals in more than 10 countries, and her photo series have been nominated for Sunny Art Prize (2021), received the Bauhaus Essentials Prize (2016) and have been shown in various international exhibitions.
BALAGAN!!!
2015, Video Animation, 1 min 47 sec
In Russia balagan is a popular exclamation that describes, with celebratory gusto, a farce, a fine mess, the most unholy of cock-ups. BALAGAN!!! is also a major international exhibition produced by MOMENTUM in 2015 of contemporary art from the former USSR and Eastern Bloc that reveals a world where chaos and misrule, along with the social comedy that results from it, are celebrated and scathingly exposed. Balagan originally meant ‘fairground’. By the 18th century it had become associated with the activities of the people who worked in them: puppeteers, clowns and jesters, who made fun of and satirised established order. And, from the beginning, artists have realised the potential of balagan as an effective framework for revealing the truth. Today, the revolutionary politics of laughter, as well as the cathartic release it promises, are engendered by a sense of outrage at cruelty, inhumanity and the abuse of human rights. But balagan is not only modern: ever since time began, chaos has been ever-present.
The exhibition BALAGAN!!! Contemporary Art from the Former Soviet Union and Other Mythical Places is about how some artists choose to depict the chaos of our times critically, challenging its power through humour, parody and the power of art itself. For this exhibition, the curator David Elliott wrote his own unique description of BALAGAN, which Jonathan Barnbrook designed, and Marina Belikova visualized as an animated film.
We reprised Belikova’s BALAGAN!!! animation for MOMENTUM’s exhibition Birds & Bicycles (2021), as it comes increasingly more relevant to our world today – world still afflicted by chaos and misrule, and now also war between Russia and Ukraine, and a global pandemic to contend with. Perhaps the power of humour, parody, and art itself lies in its ability to lift us out of the darkness and, soaring above it, develop new perspectives and better hopes.
CLICK HERE to go to the Birds & Bicycles Exhibition Page > >
RELATED MATERIALS:
David Elliott (text) & Jonathan Barnbrook (graphics), BALAGAN!!! (2015), print on paper
Watch here the Spotlight interview with Marina Belikova