Solo Exhibitions
2022 "Dress of Freedom." Panda Cultural Platform. Berlin. (G)
2021 "Internal Intervention", Bla-Bla Project, Berlin, (G)
2020 "Exercises". Vinogradov Gallery, Berlin, (G)
2020 "Repatriates. The lost branches." Galerie der Einheit. Potsdam, (G)
2020 "Exercises." Vinogradov Gallery, Berlin, (G)
2020 “Forgive us Rosa Luxemburg”, Lauschengrif, Berlin, (G)
2018 “Refrain”, BLAH BLAH Projektraum, , Berlin, (G)
2017 "Hand swing", Fine Art Gallery, Moscow,(R)
2015 "Texte"Simon Mraz Residence, Russian-Austrian Cultural Forum, Moscow,(R)
2014 Performance "The Stairs", ArtPlay, Moscow, (R)
2014 “Why do I always feel guilty?", Zverev Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow, (R)
2012 "Stage 2", Zverev Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow, (R)
Honors and Awards
XPRMNTL anti-festival. Official Selections. London, (UK) 2022
K-Music and Arts Film Festival (KMAFF). Official Selections. Seoul, (KR) 2022
Mannheim Arts and Film Festival. "White flag". Best Human Rights Film, (D) 2022
Lift-Off Filmmaker Sessions @ PinewoodStudios. Official Selections. Buckinghamshire, (UK) 2022
The Thilsri, International Film Festival. "White flag". Best music video. Alampattu, (IN) 2022
Preis von „Jury der Kommission „30 Jahre Friedliche Revolution und Deutsche Einheit“ (G) 2020
Top 100 of the Rated Artists, Rating In Art, Moscow, (R) 2018
Top 100 of the Rated Artists, Rating In Art, Moscow, (R) 2017
Just Award 1st Prize, Moscow, (R) 2014
Nomination "Project of the Year", Kandinsky Prize, Moscow, (R) 2013
Special Award, Scotch, Moscow, (R) 2010
Membership
Professional Association of Visual Artists Berlin bbk berlin e.V., joined 2018
Moscow Artists Union, joined 2002
Selected Group Exhibitions
2023 Kunst im Kontext gefährdeter Sprachen, Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin. (G)
2023 Frieden. Pride art, Berlin. (G)
2022 XPRMNTL anti-festival. London, (UK)
2022 K-Music and Arts Film Festival (KMAFF). Seoul, (KR)
2022 Mannheim Arts and Film Festival. "White flag". Best Human Rights Film, (G)
2022 Lift-Off Filmmaker Sessions @ PinewoodStudios. Buckinghamshire(UK)
2022 The Thilsri, International Film Festival. "White flag". Best music video. (IN)
2022 Room 252. Berlin(G)
2022 KunstKaufen Karl Hofer Gesellschaft e. V. UdK, Berlin, (G)
2022 This is not a Lovesong, Projektraum Galerie M, Berlin, (G)
2022 Intersectional, Pride art, Berlin,(G)
2021 Triennial Contemporary Art. Fifth wave. Museum of Contemporary Art Garage.
Shchusev Museum of Architecture, Moscow (R)
2020 “Body”. ORI Künstlerische Forum, Berlin, (G)
2019 “Unreal desires”. Somos, Berlin, (G)
2019 “Berliner Transit”. Omsk, (R)
2019 “Interwinnen Bodies”, Somos, Berlin, (G)
2019 “Grandma”. Old house. Berlin, (G)
2018 "Hair". Moscow Modern Art Museum
2018 “Present continuous”, Zverev Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow, (R)
2018 Uzbekistan Biennale, Tashkent, (Uz)
2018 "There and now!" Manege, Moscow, (R)
2018 "Apology of Delusions", Moscow Modern Art Museum, Moscow, (R)
2018 "Exercise Sports Health2. Berlin, (G)
2018 "The new signs of existence", Quedlinburg, (G)
2018 "Survive", Berlin Art Week, (G)
2018 "Divinity Perspectives of a Higher Power", Berlin, (G)
2017 "11 New. Exhibition of Young Performance Artists ", State Gallery on Solyanka Street, Moscow (R)
2017 "The pain and the will", Stella Art Foundation, Moscow, (R)
2017 "On the way to eternity", Moscow, (R)
2017 "Participants temporarily unavailable", "Moscow, (R)
2016 "Psycho", Factory, Moscow, (R)
2016 "Raw / Cooked", Moscow Modern Art Museum, (R)
2016 Social and Artistic Project "Other Atmosphere", Children's Hospital in Tushino, Moscow, (R)
2015 "Her", Vladivostok, (R)
2015 "Russia vs. Russia ", Berlin, G)
2015 "The Studio 2015", Moscow Modern Art Museum, (R)
2015 "The art communities", Moscow Museum, (R)
2015 "A - the art, F - the feminism", Moscow, (R)
2015 "Co-Penetration", Nagornaya Gallery, 6th Moscow Biennial of Contemporary Art, (R)
2015 "Panoptikum", special program of the 6th Moscow Biennial of Contemporary Art, (R)
2014 Exhibitions "Just Award", laureate, Moscow, (R)
2014 "Behind Castle", Gallery A3, Moscow, (R)
2013 Long List of the Kandinsky Prize, Udarnik, Moscow, (R)
2013 "Feminist Pencil 2", 5th Moscow Biennial of Contemporary Art, Moscow, Sankt Peterburg, (R), Oslo, (Nr), (Fn)
2012 "The Way, the Railway", ArtPlay, Moscow, (R)
2011 "The Interior", Factory, 4th Moscow Biennial of Contemporary Art, (R)
Lectures and Workshops
2022 "Wiederstand. Hier und jetzt", Gedenkstätte deutscher Widerstand, Berlin (G)
2022 Workshop "Flying to freedom", Zuckerwattenkrowatten", Berlin, (G)
2016 Workshop "Other Atmosphere", Children's Hospital in Tushino, Moscow, (R)
2016 Workshop "Graphic novella", Kazan, (R)
2015 Qweerfemakzia, Wien. (At)
2014-2015 Lecturer in College named Ivan Fedorov. Moscow, (R)
Subject: illustration, collage.
Multidisyiplinary artist, researcher
Yanka Smetanina was born in Belebey in Bashkiria into a multicultural family. She lived in Siberia, has spent a long time in Moscow, where she graduated from the Moscow State University of Print Media, studied philosophy and art at the Institute of Contemporary Art, and performance at the PYRFYR school. She graduates studies in the Art in Context program, at UDK Berlin (artwork in cultural institutions). The main theme of her artistic research is the full range of personal and social experiences, situational exploration of reality and interaction with it, and in specific themes such as trauma, identity, memory, and body as memory. She is primarily interested in how private and collective memory can influence, transform, construct, represent and deconstruct reality. She works with social problems and adheres to the principle of maximum connection with personal experience and subject matter. She has participated in international biennials, group, and solo exhibitions and is now a Berlin-based artist.
I understand myself as an interdisciplinary and transnational nomad, an anti-fascist, a pacifist, radical anarcho-feminist with migrations experience, and I speak and act from the position of an oppressed minority. A decisive and pivotal moment in my artistic practice was the screening of the project "Residents of the 5th psychiatric hospital in Khotkovo,"(1) which publicly exposed the oppression of women faced with repressive psychiatry and my own. Anarchism with a public confession of being a feminist was superimposed on my multicultural roots, leading me to be excluded from the majority community. In defending my position I felt the need to speak openly and unabashedly, without apology for leaving the place where they were trying to put me. As I gradually found my voice, I spoke up for those who had not yet found that strength. By exploring my own weakness and powerlessness (2), (3), (17),
and trying to fill the missing gaps, I came to understand how the private affects the public.
Working with family archives and confronting the mechanisms of repression and manipulation of collective memory, led me to the process of reconstructing my own history. As an artist and performer I was interested in the moment of absence, the erasure by the repressive machine of personality (4), (5) and history (6), (7), I connected the personal and the collective archive of memory in my projects reflecting the Soviet past (8), (9).
Being in a country with an increasingly patriarchal conservative background, I could not get past the process of women's oppression by sexism and objectification. Which provided an impetus for exploring the body and queerness, in the context of memory and trauma. (10), (11).
Finding it necessary to support the position of the socially weak disabled and the elderly I did projects tied to a specific place about acute social themes. (12).
Being a mother myself, I was interested in such a vulnerable group as children (13), (14), (15).
Events in Ukraine strengthened my anti-war (16), (17), and (18) anti-state position, I decided to leave Russia as well.
I was born in Bashkiria, an autonomous Soviet republic, in a small Bashkir town where most residents spoke Bashkir and Tatar, and still, remember a few phrases in Tatar. My multinational background prevented me from being recognized as "my own" to many, but rather exposed me to even more significant exclusion. "Being different" made me part of a community of others.
In corrupt Russia, the mechanism of memory falsification for political purposes is well established. Soviet rule, interspersed with the dictatorships of Stalin and Putin, has created a tool for censoring and suppressing information and historical memory by canning archives and correcting school textbooks. In a country without democracy, with violence against women and rampant discrimination, the feminist movement has been the most progressive, both in its struggle for the rights of oppressed minorities and in its decolonial preservation of memory. This is how I came to collect the archives of my multi-ethnic family, in which almost the entire older generation was subjected to repression. The forced exile of members of my family left a mark on my perception of life. In the absence of the possibility (in fact, until the beginning of the 21st century) to move freely in Russia, this fact strongly influenced my fate. In the project "Lost Branches" (7) dedicated to my German grandmother, it was important for me to show not only the difficult war period for Russian Germans, but also the moment of their non-recognition in their new homeland.
Now identity as a construct and the preservation of cultural memory are the main focus of my research interests.