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Anna Bitkina
In your recent projects, you center on prominent figures of 20th-century art, themes of Renaissance painting, and periodicals by female factory workers from Lowell, USA. How do you navigate yourselves through these narratives, select subjects for your projects, and process the research material?

Sonia Kazovsky
‘I engage with figures and narratives that reflect larger social and political constructions. My aim is not merely to recount stories of injustice but rather unveil different “hauntologies” and, through this, propose a lively methodology of political repair and recreation. By “political” I refer to how we organize and live together, from the micro to the macro level. From individual relationships to broader societal structures, including knowledge systems and institutions.  I look for figures and stories that signal the recurrence of narratives and their persistent reproduction. In this repitition, the way we habitually read stories and narratives is entangled with multiple structures, value systems and bodies of knowledge. My work involves thoroughly analyzing these entanglements to create a productive interference that can subvert the process of their reproduction. I begin with something tangible and familiar and work it until it mutates and shifts – much like my research into the life and work of the artist Ana Mendietta.

The work Power Play (2019) was prompted by a visit in 2016 to an exhibition that included Carl Andre’s 144 Magnesium Square (1969). There was no contextualization of the work beyond Andre’s art-historical status, despite the institution appropriating feminist discourse. This raised a critical question for me: What does it mean for institutions to truly become ‘feminist’? What is at stake in making Andre’s work a site of discussion? Andre is controversially linked to Mendieta’s death, with substantial forensic evidence suggesting his involvement. Yet, the different cultural and socio-economic power dynamics at play in society have led to a lack of accountability for Andre, both within cultural, juridical, and financial constructs and narratives. This investigation led me to scrutinize the value systems within both the art world and society at large that sustain historical narratives in a way that shields Andre and preserves his legacy. Through my research, I unraveled these complexities and tried to propose ways to navigate, rectify and hack some of these systems. The outcome of this research was a theatrical script that embodies multiple characteristics and taps into different value systems: a book that serves as both a script and a score; a recontextualization of Mendieta’s life and work; and a museum acquisition object that alters the narrative surrounding Andre, linking his name to Mendieta’s — a reversal of the usual association of her life and work with his name.’

Anna Bitkina
How would you describe your artistic methodology and artistic decisions? What criteria do you use to determine what is presented to the audience and what is left behind (or becomes a leftover from your research and artistic production)?

Sonia Kazovsky
‘In recent years, I have approached my artistic practice as processes of worldbuilding, guidedm by a broad theoretical and conceptual framework. This involves developing work grounded in comprehensive theories that introduce new terminology, references, bibliographies and archival material. Each worldbuilding endeavor, therefore, presents new aesthetic principles and methodologies. My approach involves extensive, long-term research, often spanning several years, with various outputs emerging over time. It is important for me to account for the way I use sources, appropriating existing material to draw conclusions, make propositions and conduct critical studies. My formal research often begins with intricate, elaborate questions that require the creation of new methodological frameworks, moving beyond conventional academic approaches. As an artist rather than a scholar, I use fiction and literary tools – both formally and physically – with an emphasis on moving beyond merely illustrating ideas or presenting information. My aim is to build an intricate world of relations. As the work circulates and develops over time, different materials, objects and efforts find their place in presentations, tailored to the specific context: highlighting different aspects depending on the moment and place of presentation. In this way, storytelling remains a guiding principle.’

Anna Bitkina
Could you please elaborate on the visual and performative language in your works?

Sonia Kazovsky
‘I use various media and access points to guide the viewer and reader through the process, relying on the theatrical as both a conceptual construct and a framework. Theater, in its origins, is a space that merges theory and practice. It is an archaic, recognized social space where the audience witnesses its own political drama while simultaneously participating in a collective effort of meaning-making. I think of the spaces I create as proxies for testing the different ideas I bring forward. As a framework, theater allows me to play with and subvert certain extractivist and individualistic tendencies inherent in the art economy. I always work with collaborators, engaging on the level of production, breaking away from the figure of the individual artist and a singular exhibition model. The script becomes a publication that is also a prop; the set is both an installation and a spatial rearrangement; the performance serves as a mode of collective deliberation. Together, these elements constitute ways of social (re)organization that are inclusive and accessible. In this way, the work of art becomes a methodology – in how it is created, in its ability to ‘do work’, in its production; in its context-specific presentation, and ultimately in its dissemination.’

Anna Bitkina
Textual components and language are central to your practice. The language you develop is fragmented in form, yet very poetic; it’s both emotional and literary formalistic. I’d consider it poetry that reminds me of the linguistic tradition of the OBERIUs, the Russian futuristic poetry movement of the 1930s. How do you develop the textual components of your works? How do you work with the existing texts that are incorporated into your projects?

Sonia Kazovsky
‘The notion of worldbuilding is most commonly associated with science fiction and gaming. In my work, language and image are at the core of creating a space of poiesis. I relate to text as an abstraction of research, seeking not to present information but to activate the imagination. My texts always contain traces, references and reading lists to follow. While poetry and the poetic function as forms of abstraction, I apply citation, appropriation, footnotes and quotations as choreographies for reading – both individually and collectively. Over the past two years, I have worked closely with Daria Kiseleva as a designer to emphasize text and language as materials for worldbuilding. Each world I engage with necessitates a different use of text and a distinct formal treatment. For instance, in Lowell Re:Offering – Conjuring the ghosts of Lowell (2024), currently presented at Post Nijmegen, I present a methodology of reworking and reforming official archival narratives. I blend different genres, mixing fiction with historical narrative. Visually, footnotes and marginal comments form the core narrative of the text, while the ghosted voices of historical figures in the center of the page provide context, functioning as a form of notation. In The Ordeal of Justice – The Epopee of Lucretia (2021), there is very little text. Instead, there is a physical set, on which I collaborated with Oded Rimon, a sound piece, and a publication as a script. Here, I used images from the art historical canon as text, to (re)tell the story of Lucretia, highlighting what is already present. I broke down the narrative representation of these Renaissance paintings and annotated the historical legend via official articulation of European and Dutch law concerning rape and sexual violence. The proximity of these conceptions to Renaissance representations is quite astonishing, revealing that the way we read history through its images is constitutive. In this instance, reading images becomes a literary labor.’

Anna Bitkina
The themes of violence, social justice, personal freedom and the complexity of personal choice within state ideology and suppression are important inquiries you persistently address in your projects. How does your complex background – marked by intergenerational, continuous political struggle that you inherited from your parents, Soviet Jews who immigrated to Israel in the 90s – play a role in your artistic practice?

Sonia Kazovsky
‘Indeed, my background is fraught with contradictions and imposed identities rooted in different ideologies. I was born in Moscow, still within the Soviet Union, to a Jewish family. In 1992, my family immigrated to West Jerusalem. I grew up as an immigrant child, not really fitting into the environment that tried to impose an ‘Israeli’ identity onto me. I never joined the army and by the age of seventeen I had become a dissident by law.  My parents escaped the Soviet Union, where they were an oppressed minority, and moved to the only place they could, seeking to give me a freer life than they had. However, my freedom has always been preconditioned and intrinsically linked to the (un)freedom of my Palestinian neighbours. Violence has always been part of this dialectic, and today it is more widely visible and acutely felt than ever. State power, its institutions, and the culture it produces dictates what individual sovereignty is, and for whom. During the Second Intifada, I was injured when a suicide bomber exploded in a coffee place next to my parents’ house. This event was constitutive for me, growing up amidst so many ideological projects, across different histories, places, and confluences in my biography. The physical and mental trauma has fragmented my relation to reality, but such fragmentation has also opened up ways to work across narratives and times, challenging imperial linear historiography and worlding. The questions I explore intelectually and through poetic and formal means stem from a personal investigation. In this sense, the theatrical becomes a proxy space where I plot counter-narratives, using fiction as a way to evoke faculties of political imagination. Through fiction and fabulations, I rework narratives to craft tangible political shifts. I want to guide the viewer and reader through a shift in paradigm.’

Anna Bitkina
Your practice is rapidly evolving. What are your next steps and future plans?

Sonia Kazovsky
‘After finalizing a process I embarked on pre and during pandemic and social distancing I am now driven by a commitment is to engage more directly with people, communities, their stories and institutions. I am starting close to where I am already engaged: for over two years, I have been coordinating and advising the Student Council of the Rietveld Academy and Sandberg Institute. In September, alongside Stijn Verhoeff, students, alumni, and external collaborators, we will transform the academy into a fictional play. This project aims to turn the theatrical construct into an emancipatory process that fosters political agency within the community. We will develop an institutional LARP (​​live action role play) script and produce a video work in collaboration with Rietveld TV, coordinated by Rabea Ridlhammer. By radically reimagining art education in a post-disaster context, and integrating various aspects of my practice while involving students and educators, I hope to create tools that other art institutions can use to navigate changing socio-political and economic landscapes.’