Julia Kiryanova (Amsterdam, The Netherlands)

Kiryanova's practice emerges from an early awareness of the body — it is always being classified, contested, and controlled. Growing up between different cultural and ideological systems, she encountered this from a young age — through language, ritual, and the way physical environments are organized and enforced. Moving to Europe independently in 2011, she experienced displacement as something lasting and generative. Her work keeps returning to the body, belonging, and what it means to exist somewhere — how personal history presses against collective memory, and how meaning gets made in conditions of instability.

Kiryanova works across painting, tapestry, and performance — three practices that, when brought together with live and recorded sound, form a single work. This is her understanding of Gesamtkunstwerk: not a combination of disciplines, but their dissolution into something that cannot be separated back out.

Her ongoing project On Excess and Form — Bodies without Permission examines bodies that refuse fixed categories. The work holds the body as both a site of control and of resistance. Her performances with nude bodies have consistently exposed the gap between what a body is and what viewers are conditioned to see in it. The documentation of Free Awareness (2019) and Death of Ego (2022) has been viewed over five million times on YouTube — not because of the work, but in spite of it. The mass response confirms precisely what the performances set out to examine: that bodies are never encountered neutrally, only through the filters of conditioning, power, and desire.