Mila Teshaieva

From Questions to Images

“My purpose is never to create images but to transform my questions, my thoughts, into compelling visual narratives. And hopefully to generate some critical thinking within those who see it.”

Mila Teshaieva is a Ukrainian artist, photographer, and filmmaker whose work is focused on constructed identities. Connecting public and private histories in interwoven visual storytelling, she seeks to understand and communicate the ways in which history is integral to shaping futures.

Teshaieva has exhibited extensively in institutions across Europe and the United States with solo shows, among others, at MIT Museum, Boston (2018); Museum of European Cultures, Berlin (2022 and 2018); Museum Kunst der Westküste, Alkersum (2016 and 2014); and Haggerty Museum of Art, Milwaukee (2015). Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including at Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; Akademie der Künste, Berlin; Deutsche Börse, Frankfurt am Main; and Noorderlicht, Gronigen. She is the author of two monographs: Promising Waters (Kehrer Verlag, 2013) and InselWesen (Kehrer Verlag, 2016).

Mila Teshaieva, Only two of us left, 2016. Courtesy the MIT Museum.
Mila Teshaieva, Romantics of fights and forests, 2016. Courtesy the MIT Museum.
Mila Teshaieva, Pilgrimage, 2016. Courtesy the MIT Museum.

Since the first days of the full scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, Mila Teshaieva has been in Kyiv and the surrounding region, photographing, filming, and writing on what she describes as “a defining moment of European history.” Her visual diary from Ukraine is on view through February 26, 2023 in the exhibition Fragments of Life at the Museum of European Cultures, Berlin and her first documentary film, When Spring Came to Bucha, premiered at the 35th IDFA in November 2022.

“I choose to be an artist as a natural way to express my curiosity. Curiosity about who we are—as personalities and as a part of society, about our belongings, our beliefs, our values,” she says. When engaging with a new project, she searches for various artistic tools and a distinct visual language to highlight the specific topic she is tackling. “However, my purpose is never to create images but to transform my questions, my thoughts, into compelling visual narratives. And hopefully to generate some critical thinking by those who see it.”

Mila Teshaieva, House of Kadjar. Baku, 2011.
Mila Teshaieva, Untitled, 2021.

“My personal history informs and shapes my artistic work,” she adds. “I am a self-taught artist; all my knowledge comes from ongoing self-education. I continue this process of learning by trying, practicing, failing. This is not an easy path, but it’s a rewarding one.” As a mentor, Teshaieva seeks to collaborate with artists who are working on projects that dig into public and private histories, question national identities and myths. She seeks applicants who are eager to visualize the fuzzy lines between history and memory, and who are burning to reflect those questions in their artistic work.

“I will be happy to read proposals written in a simple and honest way. While reading your text I want to feel your motivations, I need to understand why it is important for you personally to realize this project.”

milateshaieva.com

Watch Mila Teshaieva’s video statement:

Nominees

Anastasiia Kalyta and Mykhailo Bogachov

Sorry That Happened

Ukrainian journalist Anastasiia Kalyta and curator Mykhailo Bogachov have proposed a project that examines how the Russo-Ukrainian war impacts the ways in which those who directly experience it perceive everyday life and contemporary art. The collection Sorry That Happened builds upon Bogachov's photographic archive of his everyday life captured in pre-invasion Kyiv. His imagery is interwoven with Kalyta's visual documentation of drifting across Western Europe following her evacuation in early 2022, as well as various war-related texts. This project originates from an intimate dialogue between two friends that always circles back to the topic of war. Through their photographic discourse, Kalyta and Bogachov strive to work through their experiences before and after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Sorry That Happened will employ photography, video, and multimedia installations to delve into how loss—whether collective, ungraspable, personal, or seemingly insignificant—transforms the ways that we perceive, remember, or fail to remember.

If You Catch My Drift (jaba)

Mari Kalabegashvili

If You Catch My Drift

Artist Mari Kalabegashvili is entrenched in Tbilisi’s countercultures. She is a keen observer of these environments, and the visible as well as hidden scars and ruptures that shape them. Her project If You Catch My Drift examines urban environments as extreme playgrounds. Kalabegashvili’s point of departure is the male-dominated scene of automotive vehicle enthusiasts who compete in car races on the city streets and in professional championships. Her lens-based project takes the spiraling rubber tracks as an analogy for our existential journeys, drawing formal parallels to prehistoric depictions of coils or mazes. Kalabegashvili blurs the lines between professional engagement with the material and having fun in the process of capturing it. That’s where she finds her support system, as all subcultural happenings depend and thrive on communal interactions. In addition to her artistic practice, Kalabegashvili works with the Parallel Class project, creating alternative educational initiatives for high school students in Georgia.

Paola de Grenet with 50 & Beyond

Masquerade

The Barcelona-based women’s collective 50 & Beyond includes photographer and illustrator Paola de Grenet, mask-maker Jane Darroch Riley, and musician Sarah Davison. They will set up a mask-making workshop and a pop-up photo studio at Radialsystem to produce portraits that give visual expression to aging in a manner that celebrates it as a process of reconnecting with oneself. The images focus on women around the age when their children become adults, and chores and responsibilities make way for new engagement with the world, and reinvention. The work aims to create the visual components of a narrative in which women can age fearlessly. It is conceived of as a new vocabulary that will generate more images and ultimately create a visual dictionary that highlights the freedom of the aging process, and the connections made when women genuinely reach out to each other and are unafraid to expose their fears and desires.

Mentee

If You Catch My Drift

Mari Kalabegashvili

Mentors Edition 8

Gabeba Baderoon

Gabeba Baderoon

Voluptuous Silence and Sociality in Poetry

Greg Fox

Greg Fox

Rhythmic Excavation 

Roee Rosen

Roee Rosen

Troubled Humor and Tainted Beauty

Yuy Tsukahara

Yuya Tsukahara

Post Punk Performance

Irakli Rusadze

Irakli Rusadze

Sartorial Identities

Mila Teshaieva

Mila Teshaieva

From Questions to Images