Vladimir Kozin is a leading member of the Saint Petersburg art scene, an ideologist for the PARAZIT arts association and the 10X15 mobile gallery, a member of the New Blockheads partnership, and founder of the alternative cultural institution Museum of the Mousetrap of Contemporary Art. The artist works in a variety of techniques – from performance, video, photography and designer books to sculpture, objects and installations, whose brutal aesthetics combine political and artistic reflection with the monumentalisation of everyday life.
The “Feel Like a Bird” exhibition was organized by the PERMM Museum of Contemporary Art, whose core collection is composed of works by authors from Russia and neighbouring countries working with “poor” (non-artistic) materials. This exhibition was the first large-scale museum representation of Kozin’s work. The curators of the project, Alexander Dashevsky and Anastasia Kotyleva, defined it in the following terms: “‘Feel like a bird’ is not a retrospective, but a paradoxical saga with many heroes … The project, which includes works from across a period of almost forty years, has become a ‘garden of diverging paths’, laid out by means of the art of Vladimir Kozin, who never tires of revealing the possibilities for responding sensitively to the contemporary agenda: whether political or aesthetic, rounded or angular, fake or genuine.”
