Wednesday with… #18

Victoria Lomasko
“I am the last Soviet artist”

We continue our monthly series Wednesday with… established in 2018 with Victoria Lomasko, currently Artist in Residence 2020 of studio das weisse haus in cooperation with Kunsthalle Wien as part of the exhibition “…of bread, wine, cars, security and peace”. Even before the opening on March 8, and thus while she is still working on the monumental wall painting with which she contributes to the exhibition, Victoria Lomasko will discuss her engaged artistic practice of drawing.

Victoria Lomasko graduated from Moscow State University of Printing Arts in 2003, with a degree in graphic art and book design. In her work, including her graphic reportages and murals, Lomasko tells the story of post-Soviet Russia from the point of view of the voiceless and the invisible ones. She uses the immediacy and directness of graphic style of comic books to make visible and give voice to the silenced communities of current-day Russia. Drawing on Russian traditions of documentary graphic art (as practiced during the Siege of Leningrad, in the Gulag, and within the military), Lomasko explores contemporary Russian society, especially the inner workings of the country’s diverse subcultures, such as Russian Orthodox believers, LGBT activists, migrant workers, sex workers, and collective farm workers in the provinces. Her graphic work, collected in her publication Other Russias (n+1 New York and Penguin London 2017), has been published in German, French, English and more. In the past few years, mural making has become a central facet of her practice: https://vimeo.com/342531466?fbclid=IwAR3ZiBxYTO98Q2EuQAodyrzsVUqUwGwohxSQ6KOli7JSSiloOUzPfreXiJ8

Talk in English, admission free