Acqua Alta

 

Katia Margolis was born in Moscow in 1973 She is an artist, writer, translator, illustrator, graphic designer and teacher. She has lived and worked in Venice for over ten years. Her paintings and installations have been regularly exhibited in Venice, Moscow and St. Petersburg. There are examples of her work in collections throughout Europe, the USA and Russia. Recent cycles of her painting feature predominantly Venetian imagery and investigate the interplay of love, loss, memory and eternity. Katia Margolis graduated in linguistics at the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow. She later studied linguistics at the University of Padua. She also studied and taught at the University of Melbourne where she was an Australian Government Doctoral Fellow. In Venice she collaborates with Ca’ Foscari University, the Accademia delle Belli Arti di Venezia, La Casa delle Parole, and the Venice Biennale. She also teaches at the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica in Venice where she served as artist-in-residence in 2012 Katia Margolis lives and works in Venice. “Walking on water. Finding new and unfinished words. Hearing the sound of the former. Seeing the usual bypretending it has happened for the first time. An unprecedented high water level that last year was recorded in Venice made me think about the fate of culture and the journey of life. I thought not only about the conservation of monuments or possible damage to my own home, but I explored the phenomenon of high water itself. I thought how complex cultural metaphor is. The word “culture” etymologically does not go back to water, but to earth. However, I have lived in Venice for many years to feel skeptical about trusting the water. You need to believe that while plowing the lagoon, your boat leaves invisible traces, converging in the opposite perspective, and your boots that are wet from salty high water leave footprints on the pavement that do not evaporate and do not dissolve irrevocably, but lead somewhere further and turn into something different. What seems to be a cliché becomes a unique imprint and the first step on the personal past. The Acqua Alta project includes a series of printed graphic works of 2018/2019, created with new experimental printing technology, pen drawings, as well as the installation”.