My name is Lyubov Matyunina, I am a visual artist based in Amsterdam. I incorporate an anthropological approach in my artistic research. With my work I create alternative realities and mythologies that touch upon the body of ‘reality’ but transform it by injecting it with fantasies, dreams, humor and a sense of the absurd. I juxtapose rituals, masks, costumes, textile and carpets, folk stories and religious traditions with virtual reality, the Internet and social media, as a means of understanding and rethinking the contemporary.

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Over the years I have reinvented myself as an artist, as a woman, as a human. I started out from an unconscious joy in creating art, then went through conceptual art school that has made me conscious and aware of working from concepts. Now I am coming full circle, back to the joy, but this time a conscious joy, that celebrates creativity.

 

Currently my focus lies with mythology and fairy tales. I research these in order to grasp the concept of the mythology that we are living in right now. We are living in a time of meaning loss, when ancient myths and belief systems no longer meet the demands of the times. Myths reflect the experience of being alive, a reflection that we are looking for and need to create. I see my role as an artist to mythologize the environment and the world of today, and to create new meaning by radically imagining it.