I have repeatedly applied for participation in various art residencies and for the first time received a positive response. Now I am a participant of the Art residence: “Workshop 1+1=1. Contemporary Art Practices: from Collage to Actionism”, author’s program by artists Mikhail Gulin and Antonina Slabodchikova, Berlin, January–May 2026.
“Mikhail Gulin is a Belarusian artist, activist, curator, teacher, lecturer. The course will also be taught by artist Antonina Slobodchikova. Sometimes we perform together as an art group “1+1=1”.
We both have 20 years of teaching experience, we are active artists, participants in international exhibitions and biennales.
One of the main objectives of this course is to give you students a “creative impulse” for further work, to “equip” you with the necessary tools and to “adjust” your artistic optics. Often, the artist that is in each of you needs to be awakened.
We begin with a lecture on ready-made, as the most accessible and democratic medium of contemporary art, which does not require serious academic skills from the author.
My course with Antonina Slobodchikova is called “Modern Art Practices: from Collage to Actionism,” and the very name binds us to the term “Contemporary Art.”
Contemporary art is a set of artistic practices that developed in the second half of the 20th century. It includes an increasing range of techniques due to both the development of technology and a person’s knowledge of their own body and their place in the world. The thematic range of modern art is infinitely wide, it reacts to any manifestations of human activity (and in recent decades, the activities of other biological organisms, as well as robots, have been added to them), and not only to the shocking and provocative. It is genetically related to the art of the avant-garde or modernism, but it represents a new round of pictorial languages. Therefore, we will talk not only about the art of the second half of the 20th – early 21st centuries, but also about its earlier forms.”
