Early on Katerina Belkina knew about her exceptional talent to see the world through different eyes. Born in Samara in the southeast of European Russia, she was brought up in an creative atmosphere by her mother, a visual artist.

Her education as painter at the Art Academy and from 2000 at the school for Photography of Michael Musorin in Samara gave her the tools to visualize her ideas. Exhibitions of her sublime, mystic self-portraits ensued in Moscow and Paris.

In 2007 Katerina Belkina was nominated for the prestigious Kandinsky Prize (comparable to the British Turner Prize) in Moscow. Recently she got the Hasselblad Masters Prize. Currently she lives and works in Berlin.
 

A two-room apartment is not just the most common type of a city home; it also represents a coordinate system for a typical urbanite. More than a half of my life I spent in two-room apartments. The world is becoming more open to doing business, communicating, traveling, and establishing connections, and yet our life is becoming more and more secluded. The world seems compressed to the size of a small apartment. Day in and day out our bodies are living through the motion within one or two spaces at the most, and on the route between them. Each day starts with a certain ritualized sequence of actions.

At the same time, our minds are pondering over and sorting out global political conflicts, economic crises, information wars or actual wars. Our minds are traveling around the world and communicating with those of the others no matter how far apart they are. Our minds are processing tons of data about totally strange people and places. We are passively participating in the life of the global community, and our participation has no geography while our physical actions certainly have. This very dissonance splits ourselves more and more evidently into two separate rooms, that of the mind and that of the body.

The photographic background of each piece of the project was shot in this or that corner of the dwelling where my life revolves. The video works as a peeping hole of sorts or as a window across the street through which one can watch or rather spy on my daily not at all special actions, on my fussing around or my slowing down and hear the latest news or a five-minute meditation track. Like an astronaut on a spaceship, I wake up and start my daily routine. I work, I get my chores done, care about my family and then I’m out on my spacewalk into orbit‒ on the internet. I get connected to the rest of the world and rest while absorbing information, watching the lives of the others, thinking about serious social issues. It is so mundane and so strange at the same time. Thirty years ago, the world was a completely different place. This period seems a turning point.