Wednesday, October 8, 2025
・5:00 PM — Panel discussion between Margarita Kuleva and immigration lawyers
・6:00 PM — Opening Reception
On view: Oct 8 (from 4 PM), Oct 9–10 (10 AM–6 PM)
Location: Residency Unlimited
360 Court Street (main green church doors), Brooklyn NY 11231 (map)
Margarita Kuleva is the 2025 New York City Artist Safe Haven Residency Artist.
INHALE/EXHALE is a new installation by Kuleva with large helium balloons featured inside the RU space that explores migration as embodied identity and a bureaucratic process. This research-based project centers around self-ethnographic experience and interviews Kuleva conducted with artists and academics who had to flee their home countries due to political reasons. The interviews often describe the precarity of new migrant life through somatic features: holding breath, hardships to breathe, or deep inhales as a metaphor of freedom (in Russian: дышать полной грудью, breathe life freely).
The project takes visual inspiration from weather balloons as political messengers, which North Korea and South Korea exchange as one of the rare acts of communication between the countries. When weather balloons carrying political information from South Korean activists landed in North Korea, the latter retaliated to their opponents with household garbage. As a result, photographs of balloons carrying garbage over water and mountains flooded the media.
The installation is also a commentary on the state of academic and intellectual freedom in the U.S. It addresses the funding cuts affecting the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration under the Trump presidency, among many other studies.
About
Dr Margarita Kuleva is an artist, researcher, and curator. She is based in New York and teaches at NYU as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Slavic and Russian Studies Department. In her research and art projects, she mainly uses ethnography, institutional interventions, and performance as methods. Through a deep interest in exploring social inequalities in artistic production and boundaries in access to culture, Dr Kuleva centered her PhD to the ‘behind the scenes’ of cultural institutions to give greater visibility to the invisible workers of culture. Her performance practice is marked by the exploration of opportunities of various urban sites such as public swimming pools or beauty salons to design more horizontal and inclusive forms of public education. Internationally featured, Dr Kuleva has exhibited her work at many institutions, including Manifesta Biennale, Pushkin House in London, Garage MoCA, Goethe Institute, Helsinki Art Museum, She was Associate Professor in Cultural Sociology and Head of the Department of Design and Contemporary Art, and worked at the Higher School of Economics – St. Petersburg until March 2022. In 2022-2023, she was a postdoctoral researcher at NYU Jordan Center, followed by her appointment as a visiting professor at Tufts SMFA (2023-2024).
Her art practice centers around the critical exploration of culture and media production via methods of performance, social practice, and institutional interventions. The Covid experience and growing political restrictions in the Russian system of education led Dr Kuleva to apply performance in public space as her method to work critically with ideas of high culture and the concept of enlightenment. She has also used the method of performative lectures to explore changing relations between space, body, and culture in the context of Covid travel. Her current research work is deeply embedded in museum materiality as a social space where cultural hierarchies are both maintained and subverted.
Margarita Kuleva’s works include: ‘If Museum Walls Could Talk’ at The New School, NY, Stanford University, CA, and Pushkin House, London, UK (2024); ‘The Guides of Souls’ at Tufts University and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA (2023); ‘UC Pinkies’, Pinkies Nail Salon, Berkeley, CA (2022); ‘The Arrival’, Pushkin House, London, UK (2021); ‘{min}enlightenment’ in Saint Petersburg, Russia (2021); ‘The Privilege of Presence’ at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia (co-authored with Victor Kudryashov, 2020); ‘Visible Invisibility’ at Helsinki Art Museum, Finland — Street Art Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia (2018).
Support: Margarita Kuleva’s residency is made possible with support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and thanks to the New York City Artist Safe Haven Residency Program, a coalition led by ArtistSafety.net, Artistic Freedom Initiative and Residency Unlimited.
