In an e-mail correspondence with Yulia Shibyrkina, we asked some questions about her art and artist life and got some very interesting insights from her. So read and enjoy this interview with @moon_theater a.k.a Yulia Shibyrkina.
LEAP: When did you decide to turn to photography as a technique?
YULIA: Photography began to captivate me at the age of 33, and now, in 2024, I do it almost all my free time – free from depression, anxiety and uncertainty, self-doubt and loss. During this time, my photographs were printed optically in Paris, I sold several such prints of photographs and then several dozen more prints printed on museum-quality paper in the capital of my homeland, I collaborated once with musicians and they bought my photographs for the covers of their songs, and I took all my photographs on an old smartphone, which was always in my hand, sometimes on a tripod, and sometimes in the hands of my husband – all the alchemical manipulations took place there, in applications. I added a film grain effect and enhanced the dramatic effect of my black and white photo.and for a year now I’ve been happy turning my masterpieces into NFTs.
LEAP: The photographic process seems to be a way to understand yourself and process challenging psychological stages in your life?
YULIA: I feel like it all started with a book about photography Camera Work Alfred Stieglitz. I fell in love with pictorialists – they still inspire me to this day. They teach me to look at everyday things intently, with bated breath and a full heart.
It so happened that my nature led me to focus on self-portraits and plants, exploring the relationship between black and white. However, all of this doesn’t constitute a specific concept; it’s simply an artistic practice that helps me navigate life and cope with mental challenges and experiences.
Even though I am happily married now, before I turned 25, I went through difficult psychological experiences that I still don’t fully understand. I lived a significant part of my life in another country, in a society where teenagers were left to fend for themselves, among other things. As an artist, I want to express one thing – the idea of life flowing through me. Life itself is my concept, and my creativity is more of a monologue; I need to converse with myself. I don’t always appreciate others looking into it, which is why I’m not actively seeking an audience, and I don’t always connect with everyone I interact with as an artist.
However, I feel growth; I’m evolving. I began this journey because of my husband and my gratitude towards him. It marked a profound turning point in me and opened my heart to the world. When I started to open up and trust society, a flood of emotions and experiences poured out of me – a darkness that hasn’t completely dissipated. I didn’t choose to become an artist; life chose that path for me.
I like to consider the concept of artistic truth and its transformation in the aesthetics of trauma. I want people to talk about me, about how amazingly she transformed the concept of artistic truth. My characteristics include loss of focus due to traumatic experience, destruction of symbolic language, impossibility of structured narrative, impossibility of evidence as a method. Turning to works on aesthetics and philosophy that actualize the concept of trauma and its connection with artistic truth. I am searching for myself, and the result of the research is that the artistic truth in the aesthetics of trauma is transformed into a literal representation of traumatic reality, a testimony intended to re-symbolize language and fill the voids of cultural memory.
LEAP: Are you a spiritual person? I feel that in the way you communicate sometimes? If so, does it play a role in your art?
YULIA: Is a person spiritual? I feel that creativity ~ the impulse to create ~ the feeling of the energy of creation – this is spirit. How I am creating something now ~ so someone or something once created space, air, plants, well, in general, everything around and then all the relatives before me, then me ~ created by the same spirit, genie, genius, God, the great source. based on this, I am imbued with spirit. I guess I’m a spiritual person. I have already felt and accepted this program, I am already led by it. Something – some program – uses me as matter: and I transform other matter, transform chaos into harmony. This is the same case when I say: ”It’s not me, it’s an angel, the hand of God is leading me. I wouldn’t have thought of this on my own. there is a presence of spirit in me – which prompts me and gives me the feeling of God in me.
LEAP: In the curation we worked with for Leap, do you have an image that is especially important to you? Why is that?
YULIA: I love all my works. I value them equally from the point of view of artistic culture. Some are easier for me, these are amazing finds, some have to be obtained with hard work, carrying out long excavations, this may affect different pricing.
LEAP: You have also collected art yourself. Do you have any particular artists in web3 you like especially much and you would like to mention?
YULIA: I’m not a collector. Although I discovered topics that interest me: gifs, plants, hearts and something like dolls. I am interested in tracing and exploring this feeling of ”the desire to possess, to appropriate an object.”
I especially love the one who creates the plants metaperson @meta_person The sincere sweet non-conceptual art my husband @pactalom and an amazingly beautiful artist whom I love very much and she greatly influenced me @annaxmalina She gave me one piece and I bought one at a promotional price and I’m very happy with it.
LEAP: So then one last question: What artist from the past would you like to meet and have dinner with?
YULIA: Which past artist would I like to meet and have dinner with? haha. Vivian Maier!!! She was born on February 1, 1926 and we were contemporaries for some time, she died on April 21, 2009. This year is significant for me, I moved back to the lands on which I was born and from which I was absent for 20 years. Vivian is an American photoartist who worked in the genre of street photography. During her lifetime she was unknown as a photographer, and her photo archive was discovered by chance at a sale ~ I admire her creative spirit ~ the purity of her soul that created, with passion and selflessness, without showing or proving to anyone. This is my ideal in terms of dedication and commitment to work. I would express my respect to her ~ and great recognition of her talent and diligence ~! It would be wonderful to walk around New York…and eat street food and watch the city come to life from photographs.
LEAP: Thank you very much for taking the time!