Text by Jenya Stashkov, art critic

Some people find certain pleasure in living in a big city, in the world of concrete and asphalt. Today I am going to introduce you to the art of Anna Dvor, a contemporary multidisciplinary artist from Russia, who melts down objects and impressions found on the streets of her home metropolis Moscow into impressive works of art.

«As a kid I lived in an industrial area of the city near the river. I felt the desire to make the streets around me brighter, more remarkable. Graffiti was not an option for me as it was a semilegal practice at the time and I was rather diligent. So I went to study sculpture to have an excuse to interfere with the looks of the city. Ironically, now I create mostly indoor gallery art, but my interest lies in reflecting on the aura of industrial landscapes and busy highways and how these affect the city inhabitants,” — says the artist.

Anna Dvor’s body of work runs a broad spectrum: from figurative images of cityscapes with realistic textures of natural and artificial origin to abstract pieces that make use of objects found in her environment (maps, pavement fragments, tree bark) to installation and video-art. Yet in all of these works she manages to show city life through the eyes of a distant observer and add new context and deeper meaning to the things one comes across on a daily basis and tends to overlook.

In her latest installation “Awaiting” (one-channel video, wooden chairs, 2022) the viewer is gently forced into awkward boredom when offered a dusty seat in front of a screen with a set image, barely changing. It turns out to be showing a compilation of a 10-hour surveillance of a deserted apartment building in Bogorodskoye district of Moscow. The text says that the building is subject to demolition, as are many other similar buildings in the area, but nobody seems to know exactly when it is going to happen. With reference to the state program of housing stock renewal the work seems to suggest a vaster metaphor for general stagnation as experienced by the younger generation.

Among other works by Anna Dvor “Asphalt Series” (2017 — ongoing) provokes particular interest. The artist builds complex wall-sculptures using found pavement pieces, and it seems to have become a regular practice with new works in the series appearing every year. The sculptures demonstrate a high level of professional mastery over both various artistic techniques and the craft of layering artistic messages. With a focus on urban identity the series explores reality testing and transformation strategies. Direct human presence is excluded from the visual narrative, although the author uses objects of both human and natural genesis to depict what post anthropic cities look like.

Anna Dvor’s artistic language could be characterized as balanced, searching for synthesis and an intersection of materials and ideas. It feels like a frank, brisk and inspiring artistic gesture that the artist consciously steps out of the dichotomy frame of human-unhuman, cultural-natural, artificial-intrinsic. Through this lens, our habitat, the city, might seem a bit more of a bearable place.