'Masha' series
2018
Masha project was made in 2018 for the Cosmoscow art fair. It consists of 8 canvas installation "Masha. Forest" and a series of portraits of animals on the hoop "Masha. Taming".
'Masha. Domestication' series
2018
Masha. Domestication. 2018. Series Oil on canvas. 10 tondo portraits In the series of portraits of chimerical animals, we seem to encounter the heritage of an ethnographic expedition, and quite an ambiguous heritage - both indisputable and improbable. The series uses embroidery frames for traditional painting techniques and combines the features of two iconographies - ceremonial portrait and naive painting. The first iconography implies posing and domestication of real animals, the second one - the circulation of their images in folklore and cultural interpretations. It was Aristotle who noticed that no animal can have both fangs and horns at the same time. Clear common sense protects our minds from an impossible nature, as well as it protects nature from our mind. In the depiction of the animals by Fedora Akimova, we see impossible connections beyond the limits of natural evolution and culture. We see the images of beings in which the incompatible is mixed, depriving our cultural experience and scientific knowledge of any support.
Alexander Evangely
There is a certain presumption of integrity, delegated to the nature and traditionally embodied as a sight of the landscape. Equally habitually, we contrast nature’s entirety with architecture, fragmenting space, and in general all our culture and civilization, as something extra-natural and splitting the world. However, in the installation by Fedora, we see first of all the disintegration and fragmentation of natural wholeness, we apprehend its unity as an artificial construction with missing parts. Visually, Fedora Akimova’s installation by means of traditional painting imitates the technogenic optics of photography. Yet, this painting is disturbed by needlework, depriving the picture of the medial uniqueness and turning it into a semiotic chimera, hovering between the picture and the object. Even more chimerical are the images of animals, which embroidery on canvas places in the landscape idyll as if made to interpret them through the code of the Russian magical forest. However, immediately in them appear impossible fusions of bodies of predators and herbivores, sometimes even birds. Moreover, the very substance of their loosely embroidered bodies is obviously from another world, more likely from the world of spirits and images than from the forest surrounding them. They are made from the same substance as dreams, although without Shakespeare's or human passions in general. But the paradox is that, that like embroidery, they belong to a reality common to the embroiderer and viewer, and therefore
'Masha. Forest' series
2018
'Android Tatyana' series
2019-2020
The Tatyana series (embroidery on transparent fabric) appeals to ancient feminine practices, while the partially lost landscape speaks of the fragility of this world and the impossibility of returning to a holistic picture of the universe.
'Lovecraft' series
2020-2021
The Tatyana series (embroidery on transparent fabric) appeals to ancient feminine practices, while the partially lost landscape speaks of the fragility of this world and the impossibility of returning to a holistic picture of the universe.
'Landscapes' series
2016-2025