Selected performances
Underground, 2025
Performance, 1-channel video, 5:37
This performance realised in the Barbizon forest in France, which was one of the first places European artists went out to work in nature. In this performance, arttist buries herself under the earth of the forest, digging a grave with her hands. She stays underground and breathes, a process documented in this video.
The reference for this work is a ritual practice of physical and spiritual reparation coming from traditional Slavic and Siberian practices of premature burial. This tradition is supposed to eliminate negative energy, get rid of illnesses, touch and experience death, learn to fight the fear of it and, finally, to reinforce one’s physical and mental health to be reborn.
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2 Forms 1, 2025
By Ekaterina Shcherbakova & Morgane Tschiember
Performance, sculpture
Digital photo, digital print, 30 x 40 cm, edition of 12 + 2
Two figures sculpt their faces. Through touch, they explore each other’s presence in space, searching for connection. Gradually, they attempt to merge physically and symbolically into a shared face. The piece navigates the boundaries between self and other, identity and dissolution, intimacy and estrangement.
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To Swallow, 2024
Installation, performance
Paper, metal wire, cotton thread
To Swallow is an ongoing research-based project examining the political performativity of language and practices of symbolic ingestion. The work takes the form of an installation activated through performance: a paper dress covered with phrases extracted from political speeches, governmental announcements, and institutional statements addressing war, pandemic, migration, and control.
Reassembled as romantic declarations, these fragments form a deceptive poetic surface. During the performance, the artist wears the dress, gradually tears it apart, reads the phrases aloud, and chews the paper, transforming language into a substance to be consumed.
The act of swallowing operates as both a metaphor and a physical gesture, exposing how political discourse infiltrates intimacy, desire, and the body itself.
By ingesting these texts, the work stages a process in which language ceases to function as communication and becomes a toxic material, absorbed and internalized. To Swallow positions the body as a site of inscription where power is not only spoken, but literally taken in, digested, and endured.
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Installation, performance
Bedsheet, earth
Enterrer la terre is an installation activated through performance, consisting of soil arranged into a square on a bedsheet. The title translates as “to bury the land” or “to bury the earth,” introducing an ambiguous gesture that oscillates between care, erasure, and possession. The work addresses the earth not as a neutral material but as a charged body marked by extraction, displacement, and regulation.
The soil used in the installation originates from multiple locations, including the artist’s family home on the Black Sea coast in southern Russia. In many countries, the transportation of soil across borders is illegal, as if land could be symbolically occupied through its displacement. By relocating and later burying the soil, the work foregrounds the entanglement of territory, memory, and control.
Following the installation, the soil was buried in the ancient necropolis of the Tombs of the Kings in Paphos, Cyprus, transforming the gesture into a funerary act. Enterrer la terre frames the earth as both witness and archive, situating the body, the land, and political borders within a shared economy of life and death.
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