Maria Plotnikova

Maria Plotnikova (b. 1983, Zhytomyr; raised in Mariupol) is a Ukrainian artist working mainly in performance and painting. In 2015, Maria was awarded the Chevening Scholarship, enabling her to enter the Contemporary Arts course at Oxford Brookes University. In 2017, she was awarded the first prize in Ukraine’s biennale festival “Tomorrow that never came” and had a solo show at IZOLYATSIA, Ukraine. In 2021, Maria completed her MFA degree at the School of Art Institute of Chicago, being a Fulbright Scholar. In 2021 Maria cocurated and took part in the performance festival “Proximity” in Chicago, US and did a solo show as part of her residency in the Institut für Alles Mögliche in Berlin, Germany. When the full-scale war started, Maria was in Kyiv but left the country soon after. Now she is living and working in CeRCCa residency in Catalonia, Spain. In her practice, Maria reflects on collectivist and individualist paradigms, the relation between group and individual, and the empty spaces in between that remain charged even when everyone is gone.