DRAWINGS 2021
Julia Kissina’s ink drawings on paper created behind closed doors during the spring and summer of the pandemic of Covid-19. They are mysterious, like the films of Jean Cocteau, alive like outsider art and free like the imagination of a transsexual. Directly addressing the cinematography of expressionism and film noir, like a movie, they feature scenes, faces, and credits. Similar to the artist’s previous works, such as the Dead Artists Society (a composite work of performance, text and drawing), these drawings reflect ritual and ceremony.
This time, Kissina explores religious practice, conspiracies, spells, purification, epiphanies, and other cognitive deviations, related to mystical or magical thinking in culture, aesthetics and psychiatry. Her protagonists are sometimes famous figures in the arts and politics; and sometimes chickens and pigs.
