BIOGRAPHY
Tatiana Koroleva (born Surgut, Western Siberia, lives and works in Montreal, Canada) is a multi-disciplinary artist, poet, educator, and researcher who works in the mediums of performance art, video art and creative writing. A graduate of a Doctoral program in Humanities, Concordia University (Montréal, QC) and a lecturer at the Department of Studio Arts, Concordia University, Tatiana explores intersections of performance art, art therapy and butoh practices. Her work is grounded in the subjects of ancestral and genetic memory, migration, intergenerational trauma and search for personal and collective healing. Since 2006, Koroleva has performed locally and internationally including her participation in Miami International Festival of Performance Art (FL, USA), International Biennale of Performance Art DEFORMES (Santiago de Chile, Chile), Sofia Underground Performance Art Festival (Sofia, Bulgaria), Body Navigation International Dance Festival (Saint-Petersburg, Russia) and Nuit Blanche Festival of Contemporary Art (Montréal, Canada), among many others. Her most recent performances were presented at Queens Museum (NYC, USA), La Centrale Gallery Powerhouse (Montreal, QC) and Art Souterrain Festival of Contemporary Art (Montreal, QC).
ARTIST STATEMENT
My work focuses on the therapeutic aspects of performance art and the process of community formation through butoh-inspired performance practices. Conceptually, my work engages with the subjects of migration, relocation, exclusion, integration, and collective trauma explored through the framework of ritual. Specifically, my performances, workshops, and participatory events focus on exploring psychology of immigration, implicit memory, and the variety of ways unacknowledged past continues to influence our present. My approach to performance art is defined by the framework of radical intimacy, vulnerability, and affect employed with the purpose of initiating profound communal experiences. I am interested in exploring the possibilities of sensual communication including touch, smell, taste and sound to unfold the therapeutic quality of collective ritualistic practices. Intimacy of emotional and physical experiences is the starting point of any of my performative experiments. Through this work, I search for the ways to transcend socially constructed models of individuality promoted in contemporary late-capitalist cultures and to create new mechanisms of formation and reinforcement of community by the means of ritual.