Gluklya

A pioneering figure in feminist performative practices in post-Soviet Russia, Gluklya (Natalia Pershina-Yakimanskaya) has long interrogated the affective power of art to challenge injustice and inspire change. Her ethos is summed up in the opening line of the Manifesto of the Factory of Found Clothes—written with longtime collaborator Olga Egorova (Tsaplya) (b. 1968)—which declares: “The place of an artist is on the side of the weak.” [1] Gluklya’s practice, rooted in the exploration of clothing as a representation of body politics, has evolved into a dynamic lexicon of resistance. Weaving playfulness with protest, she organizes temporary collectives that include the disenfranchised—migrants, LGBTQ+ communities, and homeless and other marginalized groups—transforming creative conviviality into a mechanism for solidarity and defiance. Her recent work is concerned with imperialism and the postcolonial exploitation of women. Establishing performance as her principal medium, she also works extensively with installation, watercolor, text, film, and activism.

Educated at the Leningrad Vera Mukhina Higher School of Art and Design (1986–91, now the Saint Petersburg Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design), Gluklya adopted her artistic name in 1995, when she and Tsaplya founded the Factory of Found Clothes (FFC). Over nearly two decades, FFC operated as one of Russia’s most vital feminist art platforms, critiquing gender inequality, patriarchal power, and the relentless rationality of neoliberalism. Their debut performance, In Memory of Poor Liza (1996), set the tone for their politically charged exploration of vulnerability. Wearing debutante-white dresses, Gluklya and Tsaplya jumped into the cold waters of Saint Petersburg’s Winter Canal, invoking Karamzin’s eighteenth-century literary heroine—an emblem of tragic social injustice—while also asserting the importance of feelings over reason. This act of a radical surrender of their bodies to the elements signified what Gluklya later described as “a jump from clothes to people”—a symbolic leap into solidarity with the suffering of this world. [2]

The politics of clothing, particularly as they can embody the opposition between strength and fragility, was pushed further in Triumph of Fragility (2002), in which a platoon of young naval cadets paraded through Saint Petersburg carrying delicate white dresses. The performance subverted gendered archetypes, unraveling the rigid masculinity imposed by military hierarchy and control. Through conversations with the cadets, the artists opened a dialogue on the performativity of gender, prefiguring their later work with non-art communities.

The long-term project of FFC, The Shop for Utopian Clothes, grew out of interest in psychoanalysis. Through workshops, films, and performances, Gluklya invited participants to transform garments into expressions of their deepest fears, traumas, desires, and hopes. Subverting the patriarchal fetishization of female clothing as a site of imposed control, these altered garments revealed the vulnerabilities hidden beneath the fabric: embroidered veins, exposed reproductive organs, unspoken indignations, desires, and fears. Although their methodology resonated with feminist theory—echoing Lygia Clark’s relational aesthetics and Luce Irigaray’s An Ethics of Sexual Difference—Gluklya and Tsaplya initially resisted calling themselves feminists, wary of its Soviet-era connotations that asserted patriarchy over false equality. Instead, they embraced a riskier, more openly subjective notion of female art, foregrounding direct concerns over mainstream dogma.

In 2003, Gluklya and Tsaplya became the founding members of the Chto Delat group, whose mission was to work with philosophers, theorists, critics, and artists “with the goal of merging political theory, art, and activism.” [3] The group’s publications, teaching initiatives, and public interventions became crucial sites for rethinking artistic agency within Russia’s increasingly repressive climate. Indignation and hope mark Gluklya’s Clothes for the Demonstration against the False Elections of Vladimir Putin (2011–15), first exhibited at Okwui Enwezor’s All the World’s Futures exhibit at the Fifty-Sixth Venice Biennale (2015). It comprised shirts, jackets, and dresses altered and embellished with embroidered phrases the artist overheard during the 2011 protests in the streets of Saint Petersburg, in which she took part. She also created her own slogans, which she described as utopian—such as “Union of Students and Veterans” and “Committee for Raising Police Consciousness.” Though these slogans did not exist in reality, they imagined alternative forms of social solidarity and reform. Hung on wooden posts, like banners, the personal garments were transformed into vessels of the people’s collective anger.

At the beginning of 2010s, Gluklya moved to Amsterdam, which ended her collaboration with Tsaplya. Her Utopian Union of the Unemployed (UUU), founded in 2012, marked a shift toward sustained collaboration with disenfranchised communities, particularly migrants and refugees. Renting a studio inside a former Amsterdam prison that housed asylum seekers, she turned the space into a hub for art-making, writing, and dialogue. This yearlong collaboration culminated in The Carnival of Oppressed Feelings (2017), a surreal and deviant procession of monsters—each a wearable embodiment of its creator’s deepest fears—marching through the streets of Amsterdam. The Carnival of Oppressed Feelings led to the publication of Two Diaries [4], which parallels the experiences of one of the participants in the workshops, Kurdish activist Murad Zorava, with that of the artist herself, both of whom opened up to demonstrate their vulnerabilities and struggles.

At Manifesta 10 (2014) in Saint Petersburg—staged amid Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its anti-LGBTQ+ legislation—Gluklya took a controversial stance. While many boycotted the biennial, she used her participation as an act of intervention, transforming its public program into a charged forum for confronting imperialism and oppression. Her piece Debates on Division transformed the event into a vehicle for countering imperialism and oppression. Visitors were invited to contribute politically laden garments, each carrying a personal narrative, sparking emotionally volatile discussions, and laying bare the deep rupture between neoliberal privilege and the daily struggles of the precariat, a term coined to apply to those experiencing economic precariousness.

Gluklya’s 2022 exhibition, To Those Who Have No Time to Play (in Framer Framed, Amsterdam), marked a seminal moment in her career. The exhibition critically explored imperialism and summed up many concerns of her artistic practice. It featured installations, such as The Red Yurt and Gulmira Fairytales, that confronted postcolonial labor exploitation in Kyrgyzstan’s garment industry. The Red Yurt, constructed in collaboration with Kyrgyz felt masters, housed a video performance based on interviews with garment workers, revealing the harsh realities of their lives. The slow pace of the video, with its mindful rhythm, turns a single narrative into a worldwide tragedy, a powerful tribute to many of “those who [have] no time to play.” Gluklya’s ongoing research and collaborations, such as The Sanatorium for Seamstresses in Bishkek, continue to highlight the struggles of garment workers in Central Asia. By working with clothes during her four-decade-long career, she gets to the very core of clothes production, exposing its uneasy truths.

The 2022 exhibition also featured a performance of Antigone, the classical play by Sophocles exploring the conflict between submitting to power and standing for ethics, adapted by the Mattress Platform, a collective formed of migrants, refugees, artists and psychologists. Convened by Gluklya, they rewrote Sophocles’s piece so that the heroine takes part in a collective protest, thereby empowering her subjective desires and resisting patriarchal injustice. The Mattress Platform, composed of Gluklya’s collaborators, is itself a precarious embodiment of the unsafe structures that lie at the base of Western democracy. The curator of the exhibition, Charles Esche, wrote, “What Gluklya’s work shows is not only empathy for that difficult truth, but [also] how art offers a way to process the trials of global contemporary life and imagine a future that accommodates to reduced material security without despair.” [6] The watercolors made for Antigone are accomplished and intense pieces that remain as manifestos in themselves, celebrating vulnerability over strength, performativity over rules, adventure over journey, possibility over dogma—the playful yet dangerous throwing herself into the elements in solidarity with the suffering of the world.

Elena Zaytseva

Photo portrait: Gluklya (Natalia Pershina-Yakimanskaya), 2017. Photo by Marfa Shuvalova. Courtesy of the artist

Notes

1. Gluklya and Tsaplya, Manifesto of the Factory of Found Clothes, 2002.

2. “Переизобретение ФНО” [Reinventing FFC: In conversation with Victor Misiano], in ФНО, Фабрика найденных одежд [FFC: Factory of Found Clothes], 1995–2013. Moscow: MMoMA, 2013.

4. Gluklya and Murad, Two Diaries, ed. Charles Esche and Ashley Maum. Amsterdam: Framer Framed and Van Abbe Museum, 2023.

5. Charles Esche, Who Has No Time to Play? Amsterdam: Framer Framed, 2022.