BETWEEN US
BETWEEN US is Anyuta Wiazemsky Snauwaert and Kim Snauwaert, who both work in visual arts, theater and film. We have a joint vision on generosity and responsibility, social involvement and engagement based on empathy.
Anyuta Wiazemsky Snauwaert
Anyuta Wiazemsky Snauwaert (1989) is a multimedia artist, photographer and curator. She graduated from Law Academy in Moscow, Russia before deciding to pursue an artistic career. She studied Fine Arts at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent, Belgium. Her works have been shown in Amsterdam (NL), Antwerp (BE), Brussels (BE), Ghent (BE), Hyderabad (IN), Kortrijk (BE), Leuven (BE), Moscow (RU), Murcia (ES), Ostend (BE), Rotterdam (NL), ...
Kim Snauwaert
Kim Snauwaert is a Belgian artist and actress. She graduated from the University of Ghent, as an art historian specialised in Theatre studies, with a minor in ethics. In addition, she successfully obtained a degree in Fine Arts, at KASK, School Of Arts Ghent. Her work has been shown in Ghent, Brussels, Antwerp, Lucca, Seoul, Taipei, Beijing, Sidney, NYC, Cleveland, Amsterdam, …
MISSION
BETWEEN US is Anyuta Wiazemsky Snauwaert and Kim Snauwaert, who both work in visual arts, theater and film.
We have a joint vision on generosity and responsibility, social involvement and engagement based on empathy.
Anyuta has artistic and curatorial practice and is interested in how arts and banality of everyday life intertwine and influence each other.
Kim’s artistic practice focuses on how to make space for norms and values that differ from the dominant ones, in what such ideas as compassion, trust, intimacy mean in the global context where continuous “breaking news” work paralyzing.
VISION
BETWEEN US there is space for our joint projects and for our individual projects.
It is our way of contributing to a sustainable society that extends beyond the relationship between the two of us. In this way we will continue to work together in a structural manner without the need for a third party.
BETWEEN US is a platform to professionalize ourselves as individual artists and to position ourselves in the landscape, it is a way to free up space for the creation and distribution of new work, to set up our own projects and commissioned projects and to expand our network. to expand further.
25-29/5 collabo-ration
SUPERMARKET ART FAIR
joint presentation with Anna Burvennich
@Stockholm
For Supermarket Art Fair, Anyuta invited Anna Burvenich, a visual artist and a friend, for a collaboration. Anna creates installations in which her artworks are mostly continuously evolving, reflecting and unfolding aspects of daily human life processes.
Anyuta presents a new work: “A collage made of pink paper pieces whereupon the artist has written down all the memories she has about her past in a foredoomed attempt to create the most exhaustive self-portrait, with added passport photographs, hair, pregnancy- and covid-tests”. Memories, carefully written down in small handwriting in a hopeful attempt to perform something impossible, — describe her whole life course and thus make an exhaustive self-portrait, — are torn apart and reassembled in a collage . In front of this work, Anna brings a performance during the whole time of the Artfair: "Badbloemblaadjes – Badeblüten – Bath Flower Petals – Pétales De Bain": 300 bath flowers are cut with the utmost caring attention for every piece.
Both works are exhaustive and speak about commitment, transformation processes, changing over time, resilience, weight, … Anyuta’s work is written beforehand: in three languages she writes about her youth and growing up in Russia, leaving her country of birth in search for a better life, building a new life in a new country. How do you weigh the weight of a life? How can you make it lighter and transportable?
Anna’s work is dialoguing with it in the present time by cutting loose the noses of 300 bath flowers, weighing 12 kg in total. In her eyes, one of the weirdest inventions of humankind; the bath flower is created by men with only one specific purpose: to produce air in soap while showering or bathing. In a society where money will try to convince you to buy anything to make your life easier or more pleasant, this bath flower symbolizes how destructive that can be: polluting life to create air in soap. By cutting them up, she changes the original function, destination and identity of the bath flowers. Can we liberate ourselves from our past, as we can liberate bath flowers from their foreseen purpose? Can we make our life lighter or does the weight stay the same?
A soft place reveals itself over days: a bed of bath flower petals, slowly developing into a message of hope for a freeing change, a quest for respect, a plea for validation. Everything weighs, everything counts.
theater show
A Number of Contradictions, Ignorances and Oddities
@workspacebrussels
On 3 August 2018, artists Kim Snauwaert and Anyuta Wiazemsky got married in Ghent city hall with the aim, among other things, of obtaining a residence permit for Anyuta. When they examined the conditions for a legal marriage, one of them turned out to be the creation of a "sustainable living community". But what exactly does that mean? That question has been central to Kim and Anyuta's life and work ever since. When the two got married, they decided to meticulously document every step of the process, from proposal to honeymoon.
In A Number of Contradictions, Ignorances and Oddities, the two artists look back on the journey they have travelled together. The performance is a playful story that meanders along the key moments of their marriage, the road to it and the future. In this way, the makers allow you to look inside their daily lives and their artistic practice, which are inextricably linked and form the personal interpretation of their sustainable community.
Press (NL):
A playful story that meanders along the key moments in the marriage of two artists
HISTORY
Sustainable community living: marriage extented to a legal entity
Anyuta and Kim are married. Their wedding took place in Ghent on August 3, 2018 at 11 am in the presence of our parents, family and close friends. At 7 pm that same day, their wedding party started at the Theater aan Zee festival in Ostend. With family and friends, but also with a theater audience, who could attend the wedding party by buying a ticket.
We got married in order to obtain a residence permit for Anyuta (means), but with the clear intention of establishing a sustainable community (goal). According to the law, the latter is the most important requirement for a legitimate marriage. The documentation and experience of our marriage form the basis of an artistic oeuvre of installations, texts, performances, a theater performance and videos and objects. We hosted our wedding party at TAZ, a visual reflection on our police file was shown in the Red Star Line Museum, we created a theater performance 'A Number of Contradictions, Ignorances and Oddities' (co-production workspacebrussels and De Brakke Grond, residences CAMPO , Vooruit, Gouvernement, De Grote Post, with the support of the Flemish Government), ...
Our ambitions extend beyond various works about the sustainable community between the two of us. We would like to arrive at a new form of sustainability. We feel that we want to grow further as a couple and as individual artists. We each develop our own practice that, as a common denominator, maintains the idea of sustainable living community, a practice where we can also invite other creators so that they also become part of our sustainable life community.
Flanders is famous for the model of artist-run organizations as a method of self-organization of individual artists. The phenomenon is mainly known within the audiovisual sector and in the performing arts. As artists with a hybrid practice, we draw inspiration from existing initiatives and we want to further professionalize ourselves in the field of visual arts, film and audiovisual arts, stage following their example.