Annouchka Brochet. Pandora. Unpacking

About the exhibition

The Moscow Museum of Modern Art proudly announces the personal show of a contemporary multidisciplinary artist Annouchka Brochet. The platform Avito Services is the partner of the project. The exhibition gives an overview of the 25 years of the artist’s work and features both early pieces and the late ones, including those created specifically for the MMOMA project.

However, the viewer will not face a retrospective in its classical sense. Annouchka rethinks her early works, putting them together as installations and outlines further variations in themes to create an extensive meta-narrative about art and Women. This includes the ways of the presence of female artists on contemporary art scene. Today there are many closely watched female artists, but in 1990s and in the beginning of 2000s, when Annouchka started her career, this was not the case. By and large Annouchka Brochet is one of those who started redressing the gender imbalance at the Russian contemporary art scene.

Annouchka Brochet’s own personality is key to reading the sections of the exhibition. Mythological, literary and mockumentary characters, which audience encounters in abundance, are ultimately all avatars of the artist, personifications of her reflections, life journey and artistic experience. The core motif in the project is the Pandora myth. According to the ancient Greeks, she was the first woman sculpted from clay by the divine will. Once Pandora opened a jar (a large vessel with a lid, pythos), she released all kinds of troubles and sufferings upon humanity. And yet, humankind got hope out of it as well.

The first section focuses on the image of a female body with all its paradoxical features. Regardless its fragility and the burden of inevitable changes it carries an incredibly strong spirit, that is able to overcome the limits of nature and create a new life. This choice is defined both by the cultural allusions to female image and artist’s personal experience.

The second section moves from personal towards social aspect of collective body, to the laws of history and to the aesthetics issues it brings up. Here, Annouchka Brochet considers the concept of beauty as wide as possible: from the moral category to the merchandise and the instrument of capitalism. The artist also addresses to the abandoned Konakovo faience factory, situated in the Tver region and formerly called Kuznetsovsky. Thousands of employees used to work there and its products diverged huge numbers all over Soviet Union. The artist acts both as a surgeon and as an archeologist when finding pieces of the past. She stitches the time disruptions and digs amazing artefacts that remind the treasure of an unknown civilisation out of the rubble. In the show’s afterword the refrain is the Pandora myth, who dared to lift the lid of the fatal pythos. However, here it is read in a different way: the artist strives to explore and ‘unpack’ the new mythologies, creating art on their basis.

The exhibition features more than 200 artworks, made in the last 25 years in various genres and techniques: from painting and graphics to installation and video art. The emphasis is on the ceramics, that Annouchka Brochet has been creating lately as a metaphor of a Woman and her art. Also, the pieces prepared specifically for the MMOMA exhibition are displayed.

As part of her collaboration with Avito Services, the artist has made a piece that continues the theme of the production and perception of types of female beauty in mass culture and mass media. Hovering above the stairs, the installation evokes lipstick prints on a mirror and invites to reflect on the fragility and ephemerality of beauty. It brings an intimate note that can be interpreted both as self-love and as a romantic message. Avito Services developed an online beauty project that allows to interact with art through nail art and prepared manicure sliders based on the works of Annouchka Brochet.

About the artist

Annouchka Brochet graduated from the Moscow State Academy of Printing, majoring in graphic arts, in 1995. Since 1987 she has exhibited extensively in galleries and museums in Russia, including the State Tretyakov Gallery, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, the Krasnoyarsk Museum and History Centre, the Far Eastern Regional Art Museum in Khabarovsk, the Sverdlovsk Regional Museum in Yekaterinburg, the Samara Regional Museum, the Krasnodar Regional Art Museum and many other regional art museums. She has also participated in a number of exhibitions abroad, including the International Ceramics Biennale in Valloris (France) in 2014, the International Ceramics Biennale (South Korea) in 2015 and 2017, and an exhibition at the Artsi Vantaa Art Museum (Finland) in 2020. She took part in the III and IV Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art. Received a special jury prize at the International Ceramics Biennale in South Korea in 2015. She lives and works in Moscow.