Research based art atelier, dedicated to critical artistic dialogue.
As education platform, virtual residency and community it serves to foster relational sensibility.
Founded and led by artist Hanna Zubkova since 2017
Why Should This Other Thing Have Appeared
Nastia Ivanova, installation, 2021-22
about
exhibitions
As an independent platform where artists, researchers, and thinkers engage in reflective processes and exchange, the RPS atelier is inspired by Bruno Latour’s thought “there are no endings, only stabilizations,” and positions art not as an endpoint but as an iterative process.
Working a lot with emerging artists at the beginning of their careers or with people with little art background at all, RPS develops curatorial/mentorship approach based on research methodologies to guide participants through their own artistic practice in relation to broader contexts.
The approach involves gradual immersion into each artists’ personal research within group and individual work, combining theory and practice, exploring both formal and archival aspects across different mediums, engaging with documentary sources, field research, work with data and other research tools, employing a relational interdisciplinary perspective that draws from philosophy, anthropology, art, literature, popular culture and personal and collective experience. Throughout participation each member develops a personal project, which makes part of collective exhibition, as well as formulates the matter and the substance of their practice for future steps.
Betonsalon Center for Art and Research, Paris
Kaskad educational program, Moscow
BBE art and design school
Institute of Technology, Saint-Petersburg
Backstein institute of problems of contemporary art
Baza Institute of contemporary art
Over the years, RPS has become a virtual refuge for artists navigating precarity, displacement, anxiety, uncertainty or loss of belonging particularly during times of political oppression and war. Many participants of RPS have found themselves separated from traditional artistic infrastructures, seeking alternative ways to connect and create. RPS provides a space for these artists and builds community across geographic and disciplinary boundaries.
residents
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process
collaborations
virtual and phisical rhizome
Research methodologies has shown to foster particular sensibility towards the relational nature of the world at the same time nurturing grounded and confident presence and navigation in it.
fellows
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Mountain
Oxana Timchenko, multimedia installation, 2022-2023
I often hear from participants at the end of the course that the most significant experience was the experience of transformation—when the process of navigating uncertainties and doubts gradually condenses, materializing into an work. My role is to guide this transformation—from abstract material, coincidences, discoveries, and intuitions—into contact with space.
A research-based approach is not only about a thoughtful and unhurried method. First and foremost, it is a praxis. Doing.
Using the example of Nastia Ivanova's work Why Should This Other Thing Have Appeared?, I will describe the 7 stages of workflow in the atelier.
horizon
interest
deep dive
upfloat
focus
manifestation
precision
Through a series of practical tasks designed to help the artist independently navigate the contours of their research—and by clarifying this process during collaborative meetings—we transform random discoveries, doubts, and intuitions into a backdrop: a horizon of interests, a gravitational field that will later draw in elements of the research. From this dynamic field, the figure of the artwork begins to emerge. For the artist Nastya Ivanova, this horizon took shape along the contours of the allure of emptiness.
The area of interest can be absolutely anything.
We facilitate deep dives into personal research. Dialogical communication takes place during this phase both through meetings and correspondence, where I provide summaries of our discussions, materials for further study, and conceptual feedback. These explorations incorporate not only impressions and findings from field research but also an interdisciplinary theoretical framework, drawing from philosophy, anthropology, art, literature, and popular culture.
It is crucial to discover the seeds of one’s research within a rich and dynamic environment: to surface and reflect not only “about each other,” but also by engaging with experts, interlocutors, and specialists. At this stage, manifestations of the process begin to take shape, forming plastic fragments that hint at the evolving work.
Formulating the research interest and its field with greater precision, taking into account new knowledge, findings, and research materials; refining the focus and detailing the horizon of inquiry.
There are no endings, only stabilizations—work in progress. How can one speak of something that does not yet exist? At this stage, forms and materializations of the process begin to take shape. For Nastya, this took the form of an Atlas of Voids—an interim manifestation that is both an archive of her research and an independent object in its own right.
In working with space and material through the creation of models, prototypes, and sketches, the figure of the work is constantly being refined. This refinement begins from the very start of the collaboration and unfolds as a dynamic process with varying intensities. Installation serves as its most concentrated form; however, the artist continues to mentally revisit, refine, and transform the work long after our collaboration has concluded.
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Emptiness reveals itself through the contours of the surrounding environment as a peculiar object—a source of uncertainty. In this context, the key question becomes the interaction between the human and the potential—what has already disappeared or has yet to emerge.
Absence, manifested as a trace of removal, represents a particular form of memory—a mutable construct in itself.
A chain of virtualities is created (past-future, memory-assumption, internal-external), but how does it influence the course of events at a given point?
Why Should This Other Thing Have Appeared
Nastia Ivanova, installation, collage
2021-22
/1/ aquafortis by Ksenia Mikhailova from previous practice
/2/ Lauren Gault, Forget in Knots, 2017-2018
/3/ Drawing by Franz Kafka
/4/ Neural network prompt HUMAN BODY IS A BUG
/5/ Neural network prompt HUMAN BODY IS A BUG
analysis of own practice
plastic research
material research
study of others' work
source, context, field research
space research
sources
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/6/ Neural network prompt HUMAN BODY IS A BUG
/7/ Axel Strashnoy, Permian projects, 2018
/8/ Ksenia tests the material
/9/ aquafortis by Ksenia of a neural network image
/10/ montage of the piece
Jannis Kounellis once said that he works with what comes to him. This, perhaps, is the central theme of the atelier. It is this responsiveness that I want to talk about.
We can talk about the death of art or its constant rebirth and reassembly. But it is also possible that we are witnessing the end of the artist and the figure of the genius, the end of opinion, the end of the canon. Are we observing a well-functioning mechanism? No: a ruin, post-historical inertia.
How do we develop our own artistic language and our way of thinking and being? Do we need to relearn everything from scratch, or can we rethink our skills and experiences? The practice of an artist is not a specific skill, feeling, or knowledge, but rather a unique way of working with skills, feelings, and knowledge.
Using the example of Fixing Bugs by Ksenia Mikhailova, I will highlight some aspects of the research conducted in the atelier.
note
In this project made during education in the atelier the idea of working with neural networks emerged at the intersection of an interest in epistemology, the perception of objects, knowledge, and how it shapes interpretations, as well as the artist's ability to code.
Distortions also play a formative role. The prompt Human body is a bug is both a wordplay (bug as an error and as an insect) and a reference to Kafka’s novel The Metamorphosis.
These themes unfolded as a fixation on the moment between two poles—the future, represented by the neural network, and the past, embodied in the archaic technique of printing. This present moment becomes a glimpse of an endless process of adaptation, modification, learning, development, destruction, replacement, hybridization—transformation.
Fixing bugs
Ksenia Mikhailova
etching, neural network imagery production 2020 - 2021
Ornament of the Masses
Ilya Kachaev
2023-2024
Fixing
Bugs
Ksenia Mikhailova
Whole Body
Sonya Savina
Dry Emotions Olga Shamshura
Хар
хаалh
Olga Tsedenova
a-m m
Ilya and Snezhana Mikheev
Sunny. partly cloudy.
Sonya Savina
On the appearance
Nastya Ivanova
Action Game
Katya Salnikova
Marge. Masha Evtyushina
Mountain
Oxana Timchenko
Spine.
Polina Rusakova
Debris. Little Sun
Katya Leonova
Third Forest
Katya
Ovechkina
Resistance Wall
Olga Shamshura
Last Price
Masha Luch
All for sale.
Yulia
Radkevich
Ornament of Masses.
Ilya Kachaev
Broken Archives
Kirill Ermolin-Lugovskoy
from Broken Archives research matter
Kirill Ermolin-Lugovskoy
2023-2024
From Sunny. Cloudy. Partly Cloudy research matter
Sonya Savina
2023
Research matter is the substance of the work gathered through the process in the atelier by each participant. Grounding the conceptual background of the particular project it then serves as a matter of artist's work in the future. As a thesaurus of documents, data, themes, questions, preoccupations and navigation, the Research Matter is a certain matrix through which the artist relates with the world, articulating both personal research and collective net of problematics.
/ the section will be updated soon /
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panopticon errors
memory of spine
murder by a group of fascists
traces of trauma
Kalmyk repressions
anarchist societies in Samara
privatization of ruined utopia
fragility of document
human body is a bug
self portrait as types of destruction
forest for mourning
on the impossibility
anonymous trauma
defense / attack
border identity
liminal
recycled emotions
on masses
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Sunny. Cloudy. Partly Cloudy
Spine
Broken Archives
Whole Body
Хар хаалh
a-m-m
Little Sun. Debris
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Fixing bugs
Resistance wall
Third forest
All for sale
Whole body
Action game
Mountain
Marge
Dry emotions
Ornament of the masses
From Last Price research matter
Masha Luch
2022
Research Praxis Space is also a virtual residency, now comprising 11 participants. We will come with the news very soon
/ the section will be updated soon /
(c) photo, video, graphic elements, sound, texts appearing on the site are property of Hanna Zubkova, created within the work of Research Praxis Space atelier, 2017 - 2024
illustrations are photodocumentation of participants projects/
On the appearance, Nastya Ivanova
Mountain, Oxana Timchenko
Fixing Bugs, Ksenia Mikhailova
Broken archives,, Kirill Ermolin-Lugovskoy
Last Price, Masha Luch
Ornament of the masses, Ilya Kachaev
Resistance wall / (not) bearing pain, Olga Shamshura