Maria Belova’s practice begins with longing: the desire to transcend the structures that keep us bound to earthly life. Religion forms one point of departure, but it also extends more broadly into ideology, propaganda, and surveillance, pointing to how any system of belief can become a means of control. She borrows from religious iconography, art-historical heritage, rituals – forms so deeply inherited that they work as a half-conscious shared language. The friction between the physical and the immaterial shows in the artist’s interest in both the permanence of hand-etched metal sculptures and the fleeting nature of site-specific installations, whether in granular materials, sound, or moving image.
Fine Art (Mary Evans), Chelsea College - University of the Arts London, 2023
Art Photography (Anja Manfredi), Schule Friedl Kubelka Wien, with the teaching contributions by Elfie Semotan, Birke Gorm, Mirela Baciak, Josephine Pryde, Timm Rautert & others, 2019–2020
WILL-O’-THE-WISP, AG18 Gallery, Vienna, curated by Julia Harrauer
re:stART International Residency, Quartier am Hafen, Cologne (DE)
Driveway Dreams, bureau fomo, Vienna
Fragile Constructs, gezwanzig projects, Vienna
PASSAGE, accompanying program with Jakob Lena Knebl and Ashley Hans Scheirl, Falckenberg Collection Deichtorhallen Hamburg (DE)
Budapest Contemporary Art Fair, Budapest (HU)
Women in Tech, Villa Mautner Jäger, Vienna
Interspace, Galeria WY, Łódź (PL)
PARALLEL VIENNA, Vienna
Soft Machine, Phileas – The Austrian Office for Contemporary Art, Vienna, curated by Jakob Lena Knebl
Anti–Anti–Anti: de-visibility, unbiased biases and friends, Angewandte Festival, Vienna, curated by Mauricio Ianes de Moraes
Get It While You Can!, Never At Home, Vienna, co-curated by Maria Belova
Search for Your People, performative action with Mariya Vasilyeva, University of Applied Arts, Vienna
A shop is a shop is a shopbeta. Conceptual store, Kunsthalle Vienna, curated by Klaus Speidel
The 8th Catholic Arts Biennial, The Verostko Center for the Arts, PA (USA)
REALITY, Kunstsalon FLUC, Vienna, curated by Anna Zwingl & Brigitte Kowanz
Bingo!, performative solo intervention, Belvedere 21, Vienna
Net Works, with Darja Shatalova, Kara Agora European Art & Research Center, online, curated by Julia Hartmann
There Was No Boy But He Continues To Live, 2023/24
- Hand-Embossed Aluminium, 32x28,5x1 cm each
During World War I, the narrative of the Crucified Soldier—a purported account of an Allied soldier crucified with bayonets on the Western Front—gained widespread attention despite inconsistent eyewitness reports and a lack of physical evidence. A century later, similar stories are revived with the same aim: to shock the populace and vilify governmental "enemies."
This series of artworks interrogates the pervasive nature of media propaganda. It employs the form of riza—traditional metal coverings for Orthodox icons—to depict how propaganda stories function as "icons." These narratives, while widely recognized, often distort or entirely misrepresent the people and events they claim to portray. The intentional void left for the icon signifies the emptiness of these fabricated reports. The series also examines how such stories purposefully evoke martyr-like imagery, blending propaganda with Christian iconographic traditions to trigger deep-seated Judeo-Christian associations of suffering and sacrifice, thereby deeply resonating with the audience.