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ART AND WITCHCRAFT DEPARTMENT

My master’s work follows a recycled thread that has passed through many hands, across generations and different contexts. My work gives it new life through collective handicrafts – knitting, in particular. The thread unites communities through participatory art, educational practices in arts and crafts, and mediation as a means to empower audiences as active co-creators of reality. Through examples of my collaborative works bridging the past decade, along with reflections on the research I performed during my master’s studies, I reevaluate and reconsider these approaches. My master’s thesis is a cumulative work that unites multiple essays in two chapters. Chapter one focuses on the Art and Witchcraft Department project. The department serves as a nomadic hub for alternative education, following a credo of ‘minimum resources, maximum knowledge’. The project fits years of experience literally into a pocket. 

 

Master’s thesis, Art and Craft Department, Oslo National Academy of the Arts, 2024.
PDF available here.

Anastasya Kizilova Master’s thesis, Art and Witchcraft Department, Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Norway, 2024.

Anastasya Kizilova Master’s thesis, Art and Witchcraft Department, Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Norway, 2024.

Anastasya Kizilova Master’s thesis, Art and Witchcraft Department, Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Norway, 2024.

Anastasya Kizilova Master’s thesis, Art and Witchcraft Department, Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Norway, 2024.

Anastasya Kizilova Master’s thesis, Art and Witchcraft Department, Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Norway, 2024.

Anastasya Kizilova Master’s thesis, Art and Witchcraft Department, Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Norway, 2024.

Anastasya Kizilova Master’s thesis, Art and Witchcraft Department, Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Norway, 2024.

Anastasya Kizilova Master’s thesis, Art and Witchcraft Department, Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Norway, 2024.

Anastasya Kizilova Master’s thesis, Art and Witchcraft Department, Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Norway, 2024.

RESHAPE: ART BnB

ArtBnB is a project that aims to mobilise resources for solidarity through the rental or exchange of cultural spaces. The ArtBnB platform was conceived to create a Solidarity Fund supporting artists from vulnerable groups. This work was developed by Ouafa Belgacem and me through participation in a two-year research programme on solidarity economics in the arts. This trajectory was part of the RESHAPE Project. RESHAPE is a research and development initiative that brings together arts organisations from Europe and the South Mediterranean to jointly create innovative organisational models and reflect on concrete responses to crucial challenges related to the production, distribution, and presentation of contemporary art practices. The aim of RESHAPE is to imagine an alternative to the European arts ecosystem by rethinking its instruments and collaborative models in line with artistic and social innovation, as well as the principles of fairness, solidarity, geographic balance, and sustainability.

Reshape, a Workbook to Reimagine the Art World, a publication by RESHAPE community, 2021.

POGON – Zagreb Centre for Independent Culture and Youth, Mobilising Resources for Solidarity: Presenting Art'n'Stay, Zagreb, Croatia, 2021

POGON – Zagreb Centre for Independent Culture and Youth, Mobilising Resources for Solidarity: Presenting Art'n'Stay, Zagreb, Croatia, 2021

CHIMERAS: Inventory of Synthetic Cognition

This volume attempts to disassemble and reformulate what one might understand as AI by taking apart both notions of 'artificiality' and 'intelligence' and seeing what new meaning they produce when recombined.

We summon the trickster of the natural order, chimera, both a mythical creature and a genetic phenomenon. Drawing upon chimerism allows us to broaden 'artificial intelligence' into 'synthetic cognition'⁠—an approach that highlights the duality of 'artificial' and 'authentic', amplifies non-human methods of cognition and anticipates modes of symbiosis.

With this aim, the editors, Ilan Manouach and Anna Engelhardt, assembled an inventory in which one can find contributions from scholars and artists with interspecies, disability, monstrous, feminist, and decolonial approaches, as well as thinkers and technologists engaged in a broader field of AI. By questioning fabricated norms that constitute and maintain notions of 'artificial' and 'intelligence', this inventory acts as a toolbox one can use to merge these terms into a novel chimera.

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Chimeras: Inventory of Synthetic Cognition
Manouach, Ilan, and Anna Engelhardt, eds. Chimeras: Inventory of Synthetic Cognition. Athens: Onassis Foundation, 2022. ISBN 978-618-85361-8-0.

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Chimeras: Inventory of Synthetic Cognition Manouach, Ilan, and Anna Engelhardt, eds. Chimeras: Inventory of Synthetic Cognition. Athens: Onassis Foundation, 2022. ISBN 978-618-85361-8-0.

Chimeras: Inventory of Synthetic Cognition Manouach, Ilan, and Anna Engelhardt, eds. Chimeras: Inventory of Synthetic Cognition. Athens: Onassis Foundation, 2022. ISBN 978-618-85361-8-0.

Chimeras: Inventory of Synthetic Cognition Manouach, Ilan, and Anna Engelhardt, eds. Chimeras: Inventory of Synthetic Cognition. Athens: Onassis Foundation, 2022. ISBN 978-618-85361-8-0.

Polymerized Cybernetic Plant

Polymerized Cybernetic Plant is a science fiction text that explores questions of bioethics and digital colonization. It depicts a future in which a centralized technological system drives the cyborgization of plants. As these plant cyborgs acquire the ability to communicate, they pass through various stages of social integration — colonization, resistance, and liberation — ultimately becoming full members of society.

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Full version of the text was published in:
Absolutely Other, SHTAB-Press, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, edited by Georgy Mamedov and Olga Shatalova (2018).

Animal Internet, group exhibition catalogue, Gallery Khodynka, Moscow, 2020.

Short text version published for DKS-Lab (UKS, Fotogalleriet, Oslo Kunstforening) and Pilotgalleriet (Nitja), Norway, 2026.

Short text version published for DKS-Lab (UKS, Fotogalleriet, Oslo Kunstforening) and Pilotgalleriet (Nitja), Norway, 2026.

Short text version published for DKS-Lab (UKS, Fotogalleriet, Oslo Kunstforening) and Pilotgalleriet (Nitja), Norway, 2026.

Utopian Gardens

Utopian Gardens is a collective documentation of the artist duo LATERNA’s project CoSA Garden // Pollinary Dances (2018–2022). It contains contributions from artists and partners who participated as well as invited guests and is a hybrid publication, a mixture of an artist’s book, an archive, and a space for ongoing reflection. 

 

LATERNA: Utopian Gardens. Oslo and St. Petersburg. Edited by Inger-Reidun Olsen and Marianne Skjeldal. Norway, 2023. ISBN 978-82-693450-0-1.

LATERNA: Utopian Gardens. Oslo and St. Petersburg. Edited by Inger-Reidun Olsen and Marianne Skjeldal. Norway, 2023.

LATERNA: Utopian Gardens. Oslo and St. Petersburg. Edited by Inger-Reidun Olsen and Marianne Skjeldal. Norway, 2023.

LATERNA: Utopian Gardens. Oslo and St. Petersburg. Edited by Inger-Reidun Olsen and Marianne Skjeldal. Norway, 2023.

LATERNA: Utopian Gardens. Oslo and St. Petersburg. Edited by Inger-Reidun Olsen and Marianne Skjeldal. Norway, 2023.

LATERNA: Utopian Gardens. Oslo and St. Petersburg. Edited by Inger-Reidun Olsen and Marianne Skjeldal. Norway, 2023.

LATERNA: Utopian Gardens. Oslo and St. Petersburg. Edited by Inger-Reidun Olsen and Marianne Skjeldal. Norway, 2023.

MAGAZINE (NOT) FOR KIDS

Magazine (Not) for Kids is a hybrid/a pantomime journal/a fast zine created by designer Ksenia Belaya and Anastasya Kizilova together with local residents for the Art Prospect Festival . The project takes the form of workshops for children and their parents, brothers, sisters, grandmas, grandpas, neighbors, and friends. Special surprises are in store for newborns and those just learning to talk! 

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