Projects

While maintaining the central positions of symbolist aesthetics (suggestiveness, understatement, the play of allusions and associations), Polina Borisova plays through her own life and its implementations. Hence the bright flashes of colour, the glassy look of the portraits, the puppet mask faces, as if lost in empty space. Any movement of the mind and body or change in reality, whether external or internal, is carefully recorded through a visual description of experiences. Polina’s series of works act as a diary of the artist herself. The author explores aspects of the self-portrait genre with both non-standard mediums (found objects (her objets trouvés), metal, glass, ceramics), and those that are more familiar (canvas, paper materials, photography, video).

Mixed media using spray paint, acrylic markers, Flo-Masters and crayons, the quick expressive line, is a direct reference to the graffiti background of the artist, for whom her ‘faces’ served as a personal tag on walls.

For Polina Borisova self-portrait became the way to grow into a purer state, to achieve freedom. The plastic connection between the works is implicit, although the author establishes a link by subject matter. Migrating from one medium to another, these portraits-states do not lose the recognisability and authenticity of feelings; they are conveyed as a call and response, as sound and its resonating echo.  

The title of this exhibition simultaneously reflects the autobiographical and philosophical context: ‘India Alfa Echo Niner One One Six’ is the call sign of an aircraft whose only passenger was Polina, flying from the bygone past in the form of point A to the boundless future of point B, immersed in self-reflection and uncertainty; in an eternal battle with turbulence, with the chaotic world below and one’s own reflection ‘here and now’ in the porthole.

The exhibition presents works from different periods, beginning in 2007. An infinite multiplicity of shades of emotion is expressed in the movement of a line, the accents of colour. As if in a photograph with long exposure, Polina Borisova blurs the details of avatars, focusing the viewer on the primacy of emotions, the search for the essence of human nature. Devoting her work not to a single state, but to a process, the author demonstrates how devoid of static the sensory aspect of perception really is.

Through encrypted messages in the form of symbols, numbers and words, we can see veiled feelings and fears. And due to her imagination and worldview, Polina Borisova has chosen ambiguous names for some works, thereby leaving the viewer space for imagination and reflection.

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Polina Borisova (b.1985) is a multimedia street artist and photographer who explores aspects of the self-portrait genre with both non-standard mediums (objets trouvés, metal, glass, ceramics), and those that are more familiar (canvas, paper materials, photography, video). Since adolescence Polina has studied herself as a street artist, interacting with various graffiti teams, while constantly experimenting in the field of photography and collage. After graduating from the Institute of Cinema and Television (GITR) as a production designer, the author continues to examine herself and the world around her through the prism of self-portrait. Thanks to her main tools – artistic impartiality, detailed analysis of described emotion, and also a covalent mixing of graffiti, impressionism and abstractionism, Polina’s series of works act as a diary of the author’s inner states.