Zhenya Chaika – the new resident of the Golubitskoe Art Foundation

At the invitation of the Golubitskoe Art Foundation, Zhenya will conduct a study of the Golubitskoe Art Residency for her book titled Art Residencies and How to Cook Them. Zhenya will be staying at the residency for a month with her daughter Sophia.

‘I intend to work on-site, as suggested by the logic of the residency, and analyze its structure and the most striking features to gradually identify a list of key ingredients, cooking methods and, ultimately, turn the experience of an art residency into a lunch menu.

During this analysis, all lunch descriptions will be drawn from nature. The selection of ingredients will become a direct visualisation of the internal structure of the residency: while one residency stores sauces, jams and frozen berries, the other cleans and sanitizes the refrigerator after each visitor. Refrigerators, warehouses, utility rooms, and even files on shared computers – all of these are organised in a suspiciously similar fashion.’

Zhenya Chaika is a Yekaterinburg-based cultural projects manager, contemporary art curator, researcher and author. She studies philosophy, aesthetics, theory and history of exhibitions and initiates alternative format educational projects aimed at fostering communication between artists and critics.

Zhenya has been nominated for the Innovation Prize four times. In 2021, she received a nomination for the ‘Art Platform in Support of the Ural Contemporary Art’ communications and publishing project.

She currently works as an independent researcher and curator of interdisciplinary, educational and exhibition projects, including uralartplatform.ru.

• 2012–2018 – Curator of the Ural Industrial Biennale Artist-in-Residence programme.

• 2019–2021 – Curator of the Shishim Hill AiR.

• 2019 – Curator of the 1st AiR of Russia Forum (Yekaterinburg).