TORA AGHABAYOVA
TORA AGHABAYOVA
(*1979, Baku/Azerbaijan) is an artist. She was formally trained as a painter with a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Azerbaijani State Art Academy. At the onset of her career she experimented with performance and video art. Her video installation MOOD was on display at the first Azerbaijani pavilion exhibition at the 52nd Venice Art Biennale in 2007. In her art she deals, among other things, with the history of formal painting as a propaganda instrument, as history painting, and as a new version of traditional gender roles. Her works have been displayed in many group exhibitions, including the Cyprus Museum of Modern Arts, Lefkosha/Cyprus, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Perm/Russia (both 2019), and in 2018 in the exhibition CONTEMPORARY ART FROM AZERBAIJAN, Phillips de Pury & Company, London. She lives in Berlin.
MILA TESHAIEVA
(*1974, Kiev/Ucraine) 2010–2012 Master of Arts in Photography at the Burg Giebichenstein Academy of Art in Halle. 2013 Kehrer Verlag published her book PROMISING WATERS, followed in 2014-2015 by the eponymous solo exhibition in the Blue Sky Gallery, Portland, USA, in the Haggerty Museum of Art, Milwaukee/USA, and in the museum Kunst der Westküste, Föhr. In 2015 and 2016, the catalogues of the exhibitions FACES AND STORIES OF ENTREPRENEURS and INSELWESEN were published. She has been a member of OSTKREUZ since 2016. In 2017 INSELWESEN was shown in the museum Kunst der Westküste, Föhr, and INSELALLTAG in the Museum of European Cultures, Berlin. For the series INSELWESEN she used the old technique of light painting, where her only source of light was a flashlight. In this way she has created Baroque-like, mystical portraits. In 2018/2019 the MIT Museum in Boston, USA, devoted a major show to her work under the title IMAGINED COMMUNITIES.