13 Trophy Cups

Vika Mitrichenko explores the problematic and sometimes absurd relationships we attach to personal memories have been a central topics within my practice for a long time. The unique baggage of specific people, places and circumstances often gather in complexity as we recall them, and sometimes provoke us to consciously or unconsciously, fictionalise the past for reasons that remain unknown even to ourselves. Working with the problematics of memory and recollection, utilising family tales and personal anecdotes, my attempt is to create multi-layered narratives which reflect the complexity of subjective experience and at the same time help to explore some shared cultural oddities and bizarre traditions. Making use of pastiche, colliding styles and meanings, fusing domestic kitsch with fragments of high art masterpieces is the means for me to enquire into paradoxical relationship between the low-level personal experience and the universal abstractions. The cultural heritage, the history of art, big social turbulences, global political and cultural shifts, they are in my opinion just patchworks sewed together from a huge number of small personal stories and little insignificant events. This constituent parts could be eclectic, of different prominence and origination. Their shapes, sizes and structure could vary significantly. Though combined together they produce a meaningful tissue of a bigger and more complex picture of the current social, political and artistic milieu.