Image by Adelaide Maher, Tokyo, Japan, July 2023
Anastasia Artemeva is a visual and socially-engaged artist based in Helsinki. Her projects explore and make space for new interactions.
Conceptually, the works are based on codes of social norms and accepted truths, which are influenced by socio-political, cultural and personal limitations and boundaries. Her work explores collective everyday rituals like going camping, storing items in the basement, and placing people in prisons - practices that are considered normal. Anastasia is interested in boredom and ordinariness, not dreary, not beautiful, but kind of ordinary things that go unnoticed yet are the strangest and the most violent.
Her practice is focused on spaces: how we inhabit spaces, how we co-exist in the same space, even when our perceptions and experiences are different, how spaces and their histories affect us and how we affect them. How people survive, live, and make themselves at home even at the most challenging and isolated environments. Spaces for antisocial behaviour, such as streets, prisons and schools are particularly precious subjects of this work. Anastasia works in the genre of art installation, performance, creates artwork for theatrical productions and conducts art workshops.
Artemeva graduated from Limerick School of Art and Design (Ireland) with a BA in 2012, and from Aalto University (Finland) with a Masters degree in 2016. Her recent projects include Prison Outside - art and research work on issues of incarceration. Anastasia has received training in Criminology, as well as Human Rights protection studies, and Diversity in arts. She has worked in collaboration with Helsinki Prison (Helsingin Vankila), Finnish foundation for support of ex-offenders(Kriminaalihuollon tukisäätiö), M-cult, Performance center Esitystaiteen Keskus, International School of Helsinki, amongst many other institutions. Artemeva has written for the Visual Artist’s News Sheet, Paper Visual Art and IMAGE InSEA: International Society for Education through Art magazine.
Please see the artist’s CV here.
An overview of previous workshops is here.
anastasia.artemeva(at)outlook.com
info(at)prisonspace.org