Anna Ugolkova

My practice explores the emotional, physical, and imaginative relationships between people, objects, and environments. Working through site-responsive installation, performance, sound, sculpture, and found materials, I create situations where familiar objects can be encountered in unexpected ways, inviting viewers to reconsider the often-overlooked world of things that surrounds them. Informed by object-oriented ontology, poetry, and memory studies, my work questions human-centered perspectives and explores whether objects can possess agency, influence human behavior, and shape our experience of reality. I am particularly interested in the hidden connections that emerge between bodies, materials, and space, and in how meaning is continuously formed through interaction, observation, pressure, and change.

My work relates closely to the exhibition concept of Plasticity through its attention to transformation, instability, and the ways materials and bodies are shaped through contact with their environments. Through processes of collecting, transforming, and recontextualizing materials, I investigate how objects preserve traces of memory, use, absence, and transformation. I don’t treat materials as passive carriers of meaning, but approach them as active participants capable of shaping behaviors and environments. In this sense, the submitted works reflect plasticity not only as a material condition, but also as a relational process: forms, meanings, and perceptions shift as objects interact with bodies, spaces, memories, and systems around them.

As environmental instability, overconsumption, and increasing pressure on natural resources shape everyday life, I see artistic practice as a way of making these relationships tangible and emotionally accessible. My work is not concerned with explaining these ideas through theory alone. Instead, I create situations where people with or without artistic background can encounter them through movement, touch, observation, and participation. This approach helps make complex questions about material agency, ecological interdependence, and continuous formation a part of lived experience.

With my research and art practice, I hope to encourage greater attention to the objects, infrastructures, and environments that shape our lives, while fostering a deeper sense of interconnectedness between human and non-human worlds.