Marta Ivanova (1991, Russia) is a young Lithuanian artist, revealing body, femininity and everyday life intimately and unexpectedly in her works. After graduation in Sculpture in Vilnius M. K. Čiurlionio Arts Gymnasium, she chose Photography and Media Arts studies at Vilnius Academy of Arts. Namely photographic and video material dominates in the artist’s works, but installation or performance expression is also familiar to her. Marta’s works have been exhibited abroad and published in various art review magazines.
In her works there are constant hints to strands of womanly themes and subtle critique. Every work is different, carried out with various techniques, playing with womanly subthemes and juggling with intermediate situations between him and her. Artist actively uses her personal experience, visually talking to her body.
Interviewed by Chiara Costantino
Hi Marta! How did you come to photography?
Hello, the artist is like a traveler (a tourist), constantly travelling and being escorted by a ‘basic’ baggage of tools. But I would compare myself more to a huntress with her fire-arm. I compare my photocamera to a fire-arm in means of ‘loading’ the shutter and pulling the ‘trigger’. Both require careful attention not to shoot the wrong shot. Camera becomes the main witness of my daily life, but not the main tool of my creative work. I am open to all media as I more or less rethink interdisciplinary practice.
Analogue or digital?
I work with both. But recently I have traded my camera to a cheap graphite pencil and a notebook.
Your works were exhibited in Lithuania, Croatia, Germany, USA and so on. How did Internet help you spread the word about your art?
It scares me to imagine how “shelled” I would be without the Internet. It‘s not possible to go everywhere and shake hands and thank to everyone. I intensively look around in the foreign oceans so I frequently engage in the Internet‘s possibilities. Because of it I can contact daily various galleries, curators, art fairs, also it helps highly in management and promotion of my creative work.
Are there artists who influenced you?
Yes there are. At the moment works of Ryan Gander keep me mesmerised, but I would also mention artists like J. Hodges, H. Chadwick, T. Emin, M. Pascual.
You wrote about your work “Amazon”: <<In my creative life a woman‘s body act as a source to convey my experience>>. What does it mean for your creative process?
In my case, a very important and integral part of my creative work is a chest of experiences which till this day doesn‘t stop accumulating new experiences and their marginal and self-led moments. And I would call this chest my body canvas.
Much time has passed since the creation of the mentioned work. I have made many important steps in my creative path. Now I rethink the concept of body in new perspectives.
For “Butterly” you used the scan technique. Tell us more about this kind of technique, why did you choose to use it?
„Butterfly“ and „Week“ are my first works created using the scanning technique. I regarded the butterfly‘s wing, its delicacy and fragility as woman’s underwear which is made of fragile lace pieces. In both cases the scanning technique helped to reach my goal – to highlight the details of the underwear, its materiality, to recreate identical colors and their contrast, and by using my body and specific fragments of the underwear, construct a butterfly’s wing.
Regarding “Butterly”, what does this insect symbolize?
A butterfly has quite vast and interesting range of meanings. In example, in Romania there was a belief that butterflies came from St. Mary’s tears. There are many images of a butterfly in mythology and religion. Also one can remember sexual images of butterflies in Nabokov’s “Ada” and Puccini’s opera “Madame Butterfly”.
What interests me is the ambiguousness of this word. It can be seen in the description of my work “Butterfly”: “Flattening the image explores the link between female body parts and something as delicate and women-depicting cliché as a butterfly, which also comes as a play of words, referring to prostitution. Blurred and distorted view of labia as a texture of a butterfly’s wing and depiction of a bra as an extended butterfly makes the viewer uneasy when juggling the visual definition of the images”.
I noticed many flowers in your photographs (real or printed on fabric). What is their meaning? When I think about flowers and photographs, I cannot stop thinking about Mapplethorpe. Is there any connection?
I don‘t engage any connections with Mappplethorpe. Although I can say that I have always admired the precision of his work, cleanness, display and quality of prints. Now I work on photography series by which I hope to obtain hand-made prints of not lesser quality.
Going back to the flowers and their meanings. Most of the images are the result of self-led experiences and intuition, but not all of them. There are images with concrete references to female genitals, when they are regarded as the blossoms of flowers – when a woman loses her virginity, the blossom wilts.
What is the last book you read?
Karin Johanisson’s “Melancholy Rooms” and Gaston Bachelard’s “The Poetics of Space”.
Any running or upcoming projects?
I am intensely working on my Bachelor installation. I don’t like to share or announce my future plans as I like to share my achievements and reached goals more :)
For those who are interested and want to see, read, and know more about me and my creative work, I can suggest to follow my personal website.
What are your goals for the future, as a person and as an artist?
My creative work and personal life can be compared to the ocean. It is emotional, broad, constantly lively, facing high and low tides. So resonances of the waves of moving underwater plates can be instantly heard :)
(Images © Marta Ivanova)
More about Marta Ivanova’s work
Chiara Costantino (1984) lives in Bologna, Italy. She creates and curates content and social media for Fluster Magazine. She works as a web content editor, social media specialist, translator and web marketer. Chiara loves Sphynx cats, Murakami’s books, vegan cooking and of course photography, especially street and conceptual photography and every work that explores gender and identity. The Internet is her home and you can tweet her at @c84costantino
