My Skin is
My Business

In the course of practice and complicated path as an artist, Maria Kulikovska constantly returns to architecture, inevitable habits of designing and space-spatial thinking received for many years of architecture study to present an idea of of the body — human body, woman body — in the public space as sharp and difficult as possible.

Maria Kulikovska's way as an architect, artist and performer began in the 90's on the coast of two seas — the Black and Azov — in the Crimea. She was born at the junction of epochs, when the state decided to start Restructuring (Perestroika) and move to capitalism and market relations. But it didn't happen that way, and the country that Maria had never seen, but which the world saw, has disappeared before even getting to know it. Since childhood, the secret «friends» of the artist were the ruins of ancient settlements scattered throughout the territory of Kulikovska's native city Kerch.

The ancient Greeks used for their buildings the female statues, calling them caryatids. Caryatids were serving as an architectural support, thus giving a fairly cruel and patriarchal connotation to a woman holding all of the weight and power of the building, holding on to their permanent cargo. This kind of attitude to the women was a reminder of the «woman place» in society and her public punishment. Observation of the hard work of a woman, her indistinctness, lack of worthy recognition, caused the artist growing rebellion and desire to change it through her own works. Maria Kulikovska called her full-sized sculptures-casts of body from ballistic soap the caryatids: strong-willed, fragile-careful, discreet-desperate women-figures-objects-subjects, which are being followed and which followed.

On 9 June, 2014, a group of pro-Russian terrorists shot at soap sculptures of Kulikovska, which were exhibited on the territory of Izolyatsia Art Centre in Donetsk, Ukraine. The art center was captured and looted by the DPR militants. These traumatic events resulted in sharp political performances by Maria Kulikovska, and even the shooting of her own sculptures that was filmed by Daria Onyshchenko for her film — «The Forgotten». These and others figures, made by Maria in collaboration with Uleg Vinnichenko, were shown in the cave of Odesa Fine Arts Museum at the exhibition «My Skin is My Business», which had addressed the issues of self-esteem of women in Ukraine, vulnerability of the female body and gender inequality in contemporary patriarchal society.