Svetlana Shuvaeva
Svetlana Shuvaeva (b. 1986, Russia) is an artist and textile designer based in Linz and Vienna. She graduated from Samara University of Architecture (Russia) in 2010 and has been studying at the University of Art Linz (Austria) since 2022.
Her artistic practice spans a variety of media, including graphic and paint-based works on paper, mixed-media installations, shaft and jacquard weaving. She explores a range of themes, such as anarchy and control, irrational and tragicomic, and liminality of space.
Since 2008, she has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions. Her key solo projects include Lake View Limited Offer (MMOMA, Moscow; M HKA, Antwerp) and Crowd Character (Peresvetov Pereulok Gallery, Moscow). Selected group exhibitions include Angry Birds (MSN, Warsaw), Cinema of Repeat Film (Panorama Cinema Pavilion, Moscow), Observatory (SAO RAS, Nizhny Arkhyz), and It’s OK to Change Your Mind! (MAMbo, Bologna).
“(...) I often turn to error and glitch — in the image or in the technology of production.”
I work with the life of an image — its continuous transformation. I am interested in how an image emerges, changes, and escapes fixed meaning, drifting into the poetics of the absurd.
By observing everyday life, I focus on unspectacular visual fragments and situations and break their usual logic. The functionality of infographics turns into an absurd labyrinth. A paper plate for currywurst grows to the size of a memorial. Vulgar graffiti spreads like mycelium and crawls onto the textile of a dress. A bureaucratic institution turns into a full-scale paper model, where left-behind objects begin to “work” instead of employees. Sun-faded photographic film turns into a stained-glass window, stained glass turns into textile, textile into a river. Sometimes elements from art history unexpectedly intervene in this process, occupying their place in the work alongside everyday images. I do not fix these transformations within a single meaning, allowing the work to retain its own inertia.
My work begins with curiosity about the physical and conceptual interaction with material. This process involves spontaneity and movement across media: graphics and painting on paper, printmaking (screen printing, monotype, c-print), installation, shaft and jacquard weaving. Sometimes an image passes through several media before revealing its character.
In my practice, I often turn to error and glitch — in the image or in the technology of production. Taking an organized structure as a starting point, whether it is an image grid or the weave structure of a textile, I introduce an element that disrupts the order or visually resists it. The work emerges in the tension between chaos and structure. Repeating elements — arrows, vectors, doubling effects — function simultaneously as navigational and disorienting devices.
Graphic works exist as an independent line of practice and at the same time as an archive of these transformations. In weaving, lines and their intersections acquire the properties of material, carrying the image into three-dimensional space. In this way, the image is constantly drifting between media, preserving its ambivalent nature.
For me, it is more important to let the image live on than to capture and freeze it — in the viewer’s imagination and beyond the work itself.
