А над городом плывут облака
Закрывая небесный свет"
Кино, Звезда по имени Солнце / Kino, Star Called Sun

"Body-ody-ody-ody-ody-ody-ody-odyOdy-ody-ody-ody-ody-ody-ody"
Megan Three Stallion, Body


Referring to the geopolitical definition, Grayzone is a blurry area that has escaped state control, between peace and war, full of uncertainty and ambiguity, assemblage and ruins.
Alina Izmailova uses ceramics and glanage to develop her practice as a digestion of places, experiences, and materialities: the Loire Valley’s castle, the Archaeological Museum on the island of Lipari in Sicily, Phaistos Disc from the Minoan culture of Bronze Age, current colonial wars, disciplinary societies… Baked in the ateliers d'Artistes en exil, works in terracotta stand as silent witnesses, testaments, containers of absences, mass graves or marked bodies by cuts, holes, bullets in an anonymous office, bureaucratie aesthetic, a floating routine, shiny gray plexiglass as a society de nos vie. Many of Izmailova’s works draw attention to testaments of stories in the non-repaired or non-restored found objects as she sang “YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL THE WAY YOU ARE... BUT NOT AS A WILL TO CONTRIBUTE TO THE CARE TREND IN CONTEMPORARY ART SPACES BECAUSE HOW COULD WE PROMOTE CARE AND AT THE SAME TIME LIVE IN DISCIPLINARY 'N COLONIAL SYSTEMS"
Grayzone is a work on indifference, passivity marked by non-glazed ceramics often suggesting the shape of a vase, a naked body in a flat anatomical section, or a resting wheel that has abandoned its cart, and overall, something bold to sculpt the rest by the exhibition of peripheries, deflated and low forms. As a sculptor, Alina Izmailova does everything wrong, everything to trouble notions of patrimoine, work, productivity and norms.
She’s still waiting for another statue to collapse.


Text by Rada p Borissova
Photo by Christina Matveeva