About – Gluklya

^{Carnival of the Oppressed Feelings, Amsterdam 2017}

Last Events

Who we are?

Gluklya’s (Natalie Pershina) early work developed in the context of Factory of Found Clothes, an artist collective she co-founded with Tsaplya (Olga Egorova) in St Petersburg in 1995. From the very beginning her works show a strong social commitment: ‘The place of the artist is on the side of the weak.’

Since 2003, Gluklya has also been an active member of Chto Delat (What is to be done?) and she shares the collective’s feminist emancipatory approach, the demand for equality and interest in micro politics, as well as activist self-education and co-creation.

Under the pseudonym of Gluklya (a childlike, made-up name), the artist keeps working with clothes, installations, and across media showing creativity and high spirit of human life.

The place of the artist is on the side of the weak. Fragility is what makes people human, and the overcoming of weakness is what heroes are made of. We don’t celebrate weakness as such, we make an appeal to tenderness and humanity. It’s time that compassion returned to art-making!

Compassion – this is trying to understand the vulnerability of the other, and working together to go beyond it. You can’t really call it sentimentality. It’s the freedom of baring your chest on the barricades, fighting for the child in each of us! You say that art is only for the clever, that it’s an intellectual game? That there’s no space left for direct impact, that intense emotions are the province of Hollywood? It’s not true! Because in that case art would be meaningless – cold, unable to extend a helping hand!

Art is not an abstract game, but an adventure; not cold rationalism, but a living emotion. The artist is not a mentor or a tutor but a friend; not a genius, but an accomplice. We don’t need didactic social projects, but the desire to help people not to fear themselves anymore, to accept themselves and develop in the way they wish. Society consists of people. It’s only by helping people on the path of self-transformation that we can change society. There is no other way.