Meine Arbeit konzentriert sich auf den Siebdruck als Produktionssystem und nicht als Medium der Bildgestaltung.
Ich betrachte den Druck als einen mechanischen Prozess, der auf Wiederholung, Kontrolle und Stabilität ausgelegt ist – und untersuche, wie Abweichungen, Instabilität und Subjektivität aus diesem System hervorgehen.
Das Bild wird nicht konstruiert, sondern durch Interaktion erzeugt: zwischen Oberfläche, Farbe, Druck, Zeit und dem Widerstand des Materials. Ich schränke meine Kontrolle bewusst ein und verlagere die Urheberschaft auf das System selbst, wodurch der Prozess unvorhersehbare Spuren von Druck und zeitlicher Akkumulation erzeugen kann.
In diesem Sinne wird der Druck zu einem Ort, an dem die mechanische Reproduktion nicht länger ein Mittel der Vervielfältigung bleibt. Jede Wiederholung trägt Spuren der Differenz in sich und legt die Instabilität von Systemen offen, die eigentlich standardisieren sollen.
Meine Arbeit setzt sich mit der Produktion als einer umfassenderen kulturellen Bedingung auseinander – in der Bilder, Körper und Bedeutungen kontinuierlich reproduziert, jedoch niemals vollständig kontrolliert werden.
EN
My practice focuses on screen printing as a system of production rather than a medium of image-making.
I work with printing as a mechanical process designed for repetition, control, and stability — and explore how deviation, instability, and subjectivity emerge from within this system.
The image is not constructed but produced through interaction between surface, paint, pressure, time, and material resistance. I deliberately limit my control and shift authorship towards the system itself, allowing the process to generate unpredictable traces of pressure and temporal accumulation.
In this sense, printing becomes a site where mechanical reproduction fails to remain a standart mean of multiplication. Each iteration carries traces of difference, exposing the instability of systems meant to standardise.
My work engages with production as a broader cultural condition — where images, bodies, and meanings are continuously reproduced, yet never fully controlled.
CV
born in 1983 in Moscow
lives and works in Leipzig, DE
EDUCATION
2022 - 2025 M.A. Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst, Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig, Malerei und Grafik, prof. Fraziska Reinbothe
2016 - 2019 B.A. (Hons) in Fine Arts, University of Hertfordshire
2007 - 2009 Moscow State Technical School of Theatre and Character Animation No. 60
2001 - 2006 B.S. in Psychology, Moscow Lomonosov State University
2021 Garage MCA Beautiful Night for All People, on the occasion of the 2nd Garage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, September 11, 2020 - February 28, 2021, p. 148-149.
2020 Robb Report. Artists of the second Garage Triennial: Mika Plutitskaya. [Online] 25th August,2020. Available at: https://robb.report/stil-zhizni/40565-hudozhniki-vtoroy-triennale-v-garazhe-mika-plutickaya/
2019 Mednikova M. (ed) Praxis, British School of Art and Design: Moscow, published on the occasion of BA degree show June 01-15, 2019, pp. 90-93.
Kalashnikova L., Kurbatova E., Pavlovskaya A., Plutitskaya M., Shneps-Shneppe A. (2018) Backwash, Moscow: Fly-art. Published on the occasion of the exhibition in Crystal Factory, November 2017
2017 Solomatina I., Shpraga О., Galeeva V. (ed.) (2016) Feminist (art) Critique. Caunas: Taurapolis. p. 110-123.
EXTENDED STATEMENT
I grew up in Russia, within a visual culture deeply shaped by the Soviet legacy. From early on, I was surrounded by images designed to produce belief: socialist realism in museums, Soviet cinema, and endlessly reproduced visual narratives glorifying labour, sacrifice, and political obedience. These images did not simply represent reality — they actively constructed it.
My practice investigates how such systems of visual reproduction operate, and how they might be interrupted from within. I am interested in moments of malfunction, stutter, or vulnerability — points where a seemingly stable system begins to reveal its internal violence, contradictions, or suppressed histories.
After moving to Germany, this inquiry shifted in scale. I could no longer rely on immediate recognition of a shared cultural code. Instead, my focus turned toward the material and medial conditions of reproduction itself. I began to ask where power resides not only in images, but in the technologies and processes that produce them. Screen printing became a central medium in this research: a technique positioned between industry and handwork, mechanical repetition and bodily intervention.
In my process-based works, I deliberately limit myself to the medium’s own mechanisms. I introduce minimal interventions — masking tape, mesh, pressure, time — and allow repetition to generate difference. Control is partially withdrawn; chance, erosion, and duration become active agents. What emerges is not an image in the traditional sense, but a record of friction between system and material, between command and resistance. These abstract works search for subjectivity, sensuality, and even desire inside structures designed for uniformity.
Parallel to this, I work with the iconography of Stalinist socialist realism — images that continue to function as ideological devices within contemporary Russian identity. I approach them not as historical artefacts, but as active carriers of political affect. In my generation, shaped by late Soviet childhood and post-Soviet disillusionment, these images operate like dormant mechanisms: recognisable, powerful, and dangerous. I treat them as a form of contaminated inheritance — visual “containers” of state violence that demand critical deactivation rather than nostalgic preservation.
Across both bodies of work, my interest lies in reproduction as a political and bodily problem: mechanical, ideological, and gendered. As a woman, I am acutely aware that reproduction is never neutral — whether it concerns images, labour, or bodies. My practice resists being reduced to function or utility. Instead, I look for spaces where repetition breaks down, where systems hesitate, and where unexpected, poetic, or critical meanings can surface.
