Katya Ev
(ekaterina vasilyeva)

"[...] A parade of alternative dandies.When they returned to the crowd, the participants were not completely incognito. The blue light in their hands revealed singularly made-up faces, sequined costumes and offbeat hairstyles and hats reminiscent of the rave parties that rock the squats of the nearby suburbs every weekend. E deliberately invited figures from Paris's alternative culture for her first performance at the Palais de Tokyo, the capital of contemporary art. It was not so much this paradox that interested the artist in her choice of performers. To embody her work, she wanted above all to express the strong identities of her protagonists. Among the performers were personalities who have become key figures in the underground scene, such as Oksana Shachko, founding member of the Femen movement and recently featured on the cover of the trendy Crash Magazine, Nunez, percussionist with the group La Femme, and Aladdin, founder of Peripate, the most renowned Parisian undergroud semi-legal techno venue. Ev wanted everyone on the journey to focus on expressing their inner states rather than on the space to be reached. The result was a slow, poetic arrhythmia, an aesthetic composition disrupted by the presence of a disturbing object: a police flashing light. 

A properly political disturbance. A reworking of his performance Augenmusik (2016, projected above the rotating police lights), which revealed the contradictions of the State of Emergency, To hear with eyes does not completely lose its political dimension as it passes through the doors of the Palais de Tokyo. Without seeking to provoke, Ev's approach tends to reflect on the structures of power by pointing out their paradoxes, which are not obvious at first glance. For example, the possibility of buying a flashing beacon legally, even though it is an attribute of the forces of law and order. In this case, the person giving the orders is the artist, who is distributing fragments of state power to her agents, shattering the regal symbolism of the flashing beacon. This gesture, which could be described as anarchist, challenges the viewer as much as the object itself: the hypnotic persistence of the rotating light becomes alarming [...] " Claire Contamine, 2018