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
Unspoken, 2020/21
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4 channel sound installation, 12:02 min, dimensions variable
“Unspoken” is a sound installation consisting of 4 speakers spread in space and hidden from the viewer’s eyes. The barely audible singing is heard from them, appearing and fading away in different places, bringing the observer in a state of slight delusion. If one keeps their ears open, they would hear that that murmuring polyphony is actually praying, however appearing quite mechanical and inhuman. What seems to be a human voice first is in fact Siri, aligned and tuned to imitate chanting. The prayers she chants are taken from the online prayer walls — websites where people can post about their needs so others who come across those pleas can pray for them in response.
Maria Belova collected those posts, belonging to people of different religious backgrounds, age, social status and origin, and created a collective timeline piece — a lifespan of an abstract human being, with their requests changing from childhood to senility. Problems at school, broken hearts, health issues, spiritual quests, troubles with career, taxes and even unwanted insects in the house — all of it becomes equally relevant in this chaotic polyphony of the existence. Thus the artist emphasizes similarities that unite men and women in every quarter of the world and states: despite a common fallacy that technological development “liberates” us from being religious, people do believe like they always did and continuisly find new ways to express it.