Kurasoushchyna, My Love | Masha Svyatogor

Kurasoushchyna, my love is a declaration of love of one’s roots.

Kurasoushchyna is one of the dormitory districts of the city of Minsk, where Masha Svyatogor was born and raised. Like all the suburbs, Kurasoushchyna is an anonymous place, homologated to the Soviet popular housing standard, grey, kilometres of concrete on kilometres of concrete. As only those who come from the suburbs of the big cities can do, Svyatogor develops her own mythology, her own divergent narration of her neighbourhood, weaving tales and stories, as dense as her collages. Kurasoushchyna, my love is an imaginative reportage of Svyatogor’s childhood in the suburbs of Minsk: the works that make up the series are intimately linked, so much they almost merge with the artist’s childhood memories, her emotions, her stories, and as such they mix reality with imagination, facts with magic, usual and extraordinary, grey and colour. Like any mythological saga, Kurasoushchyna, my love has heroes and heroines, who live and act in the city of Minsk, especially in its suburbs; they have different characteristics, some are caught in the stillness of an astonished gaze, immersed in the deepest melancholy, some fly, others let themselves be carried away by a flock of white swans. The vain attempts to build bonds and relationships in a totally alienated urban environment encourage the heroines of this story, in particular, to blend in with the landscape, allow them to be assimilated by it, hide, adapt to the point of being trapped in it.

The scenes created by Svyatogor are built on various levels of meaning: images of everyday life, family memories, fantastic inserts, colour, shapes: the result is phantasmagoric, apparently surreal and irrational. In fact, these compositions perfectly reflect the artist’s mnemonic process, her reconstruction of childhood and above all the contradictions and the oddities that arise from the appropriation and tampering of an archive of images and past that is both personal and collective.

 
Sleeping girls (2016)
from the series Kurasoushchyna, my love (2015-2017)
Digital collage, variable dimensions
© the artist
16/12/2020