Alina Izmailova’s work explores spaces in their full materiality, along with the social and geopolitical experiences that may be associated with them. Through ceramics and gleaning practices, she investigates themes of liminality, marginality, and the concept of “gray zones,” encompassing all their uncertainty and ambiguity.
Her assembled pieces thus become witnesses and testimonies to long-standing forms of violence—particularly colonial—that she illustrates within installations sometimes veering into an almost bureaucratic aesthetic.
Her research evokes themes of indifference, passivity, the periphery, the violence of labor, the drive for productivity, and certain social norms, all expressed through found or crafted objects. Her lamp, composed of pots with faux ceramic appearances, becomes a way of repurposing objects from their original use: these pots, once meant to contain life, are transformed into closed, empty spaces.
Emerging from ruin and conflict are objects that reflect her experience of specific places and politically charged situations, while also questioning museum institutions, critiquing their certain forms of hypocrisy.

Text by emploi fictif
Photo by Nadezhda Ermakova