Artist Name: Margarita Kuleva
Residency Dates: February – November 2025
Born: 1986
Hometown: St Petersburg, Russia
Lives & Works: New York, USA
URL: margaritakuleva.com | Instagram @ritakuleva
Education:
2019 – PhD in Art Sociology, Bielefeld University, Germany — Higher School of Economics, Russia
2009 – 2011 – MA in Sociology, Higher School of Economics in Saint Petersburg, Russia
2005 – 2009 – BA in Liberal Arts, Bard College, NY (double degree with Saint Petersburg State University)
Bio/Statement:
Margarita Kuleva is an artist, researcher, and curator. She is based in New York and teaches at NYU Arts&Science and Steinhardt. In her research and art projects, she mainly uses ethnography, institutional interventions, and performance as methods. She is interested in exploring social inequalities in artistic production and boundaries in access to culture. In particular, her PhD was devoted to the ‘behind the scenes’ of cultural institutions to give greater visibility to the invisible workers of culture. In her performance practice, she explores the opportunities of various urban sites such as public swimming pools or beauty salons to design more horizontal and inclusive forms of public education. She has worked with a number of international cultural institutions, including Manifesta Biennale, Pushkin House in London, Garage MoCA, Goethe Institute, Helsinki Art Museum, and more. Till March 2022 she worked at the Higher School of Economics – St. Petersburg as an Associate Professor in Cultural Sociology and Head of the Department of Design and Contemporary Art. 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 Margarita 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.
