моя self үҙаң
AT SNT BUROVIK RESIDENCY
The project addresses identity as a fluid construction, assembled from different languages, places, and cultural and informational contexts. The mixing of Russian, English, and Bashkir in the title becomes part of this structure.
Especially for the exhibition, Ekaterina Belukhina created a series of works in gouache on semi-transparent fabric. One further object the artist kept outside of public documentation: it could only be seen inside the exhibition itself.
Part of the project was the performance BREAK THE BREAD. Four participants received descriptions of fictional countries and, for the duration of the action, took on the identities offered to them. The only condition was the impossibility of eating on one’s own: each depended on the decision and action of another.
The performance unfolded around the everyday gesture of feeding, in which situations of dependency, care, awkwardness, and reciprocity arose. The final shared gesture of breaking bread, built into the structure of the work, never came to pass among all the participants.
gouache on semi-transparent fabric (100/200cm), embroidered passport, perfomance — Ufa, Russia, 2026
Curator: Anna Condrashova
One object the artist kept outside of public documentation: it could only be seen inside the exhibition itself
Exhibition guests could create their own flag
REFLECTION BY Elvira Saitgareeva
Ekaterina currently lives in London; she was born in Bashkortostan. Her first and last names are Russian, while on her mother’s side she has Tatar roots. And this title seems to land precisely on her own situation with identity — and that of everyone who has left the bounds of a familiar place and come to understand themselves anew.
It was only in Moscow that I discovered, to my surprise, just how “non-white” I am, by one curator’s definition :))
Үҙаң — Tatar for “self-consciousness” / “self-awareness.” The word itself is made up of үҙ — “one’s own, ” “self” — and аң — “mind, ” “consciousness.”
So literally, there’s already some kind of “one’s own consciousnes s, ” “one’s own mind” inside it.
And here I want to underline a social contradiction: we often try to confirm this self-awareness through some reference group. As if we need someone on the outside to say: yes, you’re one of us, you have the right to call yourself that.
This shows up especially strongly, it seems to me, among émigrés.
In the place you’ve moved to, you’re not one of them, and perhaps you never fully will be. And in the place you left, you’re no longer quite one of them either. You’ve changed, the place has changed, the context is lost.
And so you end up in an identity limbo, suspended in between: if nowhere fully recognizes me as its own, then who am I at all?
And it turns out that this is actually a very good place from which to stop waiting for outside confirmation.
If үҙаң is literally “one’s own consciousne ss, then maybe there’s no need to receive it from any group at all.
You can grant yourself the right to define who you are. To come to know yourself on your own. To decide for yourself which places, languages, cultures, families, and experiences are yours — and then tell others about it.
You might get a jab from someone “more Bash ki r, r a comment like “you don’t look Russian at all” — well, they can go fuck themselves.