Katerina Belkina, Personal Identity, 2016

Concept of the series: Revival:

Revival is a series of allegories about the Neo-Renaissance, which speak of the revival of interest in the spiritual, a kind of awakening. Rough materialism is weakening, and humanity is more and more willing to turn to humanism and spiritual progress. This affects individuals’ interests. Self-education and self-discovery in the context of concern for society, for the world, is almost becoming the most important “hobby”. Belief in higher forces, in a higher destiny, is a vital need of the psyche, therefore man seeks new incarnations or tries to transform the existent ones. As mankind keeps returning to this search in the process of history, this cyclicity leads us to new stages of development.

Therefore, this series is based on symbols and metaphors. I take the visual images of the Renaissance and put them together into new constructions that modern man can understand. The baby is in the maternal womb or in the hands of the parents, which for me means that “we are in the hands of our fate”. My connection to Renaissance art is a balance between spirituality and matter.

A special element of the Renaissance is the secular character of culture and its anthropocentrism, the liberation from the influence of the church in the search for individuality and the material world. If we assume that the starting point of this process was the Renaissance, then the finale, or rather the ellipse, is pop culture — the culture of the masses. Karl Jaspers called mass art “a decay in the essence of art”. Mass consumption leads us into a dead end and conflicts with its main purpose. Revival in the sense of rebirth shows the way out of the agenda of consumerism and materialism in the exploration of the self as an element of the holistic mechanism of the universe, the gaining of a new faith. In the past it helped man to survive, but today its task is to raise humanity to a new level of consciousness.

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