Semyon Motalyanets, St. Petersburg  

I will rub soap on the asphalt sidewalk in the form of a stretched out path. I will wet soap from a pulverizer and begin to skate as a person skates in winter on the ice. I will skate barefoot in jeans rolled up to the knee. The skating zone will be marked.

Semyon was born in Brest, Belorussia and moved to St. Petersburg in 2003 to study at the St. Petersburg Applied Art Academy. He graduated from the Department of Monumental Decorative Painting in 2009 and studied in the Pro Arte Foundation’s contemporary art program from 2010-2012.  He works together with the Dmitrii Petykhov in the group “MYLO” (Soap).  The theme of their work is cleanliness — purification with cleaning elements. They create performances, installations, objects, and prints and work primarily with household soap.  Through the residency, Semyon hopes to deepen his knowledge of American contemporary art, become acquainted with new practices in art, and new people working in the field of art, as well as to realize his project “Photoshop,” demonstrating the absence of “objective reality.”