Margarita Galandina
Writing and Photos By Margaret Galandin
Photo Editing By Tram Huynh
About The Artist:
Margarita Galandina is a Siberian-born multidisciplinary artist living in London. Having grown up in the republic of Buryatia, she remains closely connected with her homeland and people living in the arduous environment of the Siberian landscape. She studied at the Russian ballet academy as a child and went on to study academic drawing and painting in Irkutsk, Russia. Upon emigrating to the United Kingdom in 2017, she undertook Bachelor’s in Fashion Communication and Promotion at Central Saint Martins in 2021. In addition, she recently completed a Master’s degree at the London College of Communication in MA Photography in 2022.
The synthesis of dance, performance, film, fashion and photography backgrounds has formed a multi-faceted approach to her practice. Although no longer residing in Siberia, she continues to engage with Buryat culture and history in emigration. Previous group exhibitions include LCC Ma Photography Show, November 2022; Copeland Gallery, Ma Photography Work in Progress show, 16-17 March 2022, London.
About The Project: Ovoo’
‘In Buryat-Mongol tradition, Ovoo is a monument that marks the land as sacred. I use it as a metaphor to express my feelings about my ancestral home. I refer back to the memories constructed from oral histories of my family members and from looking at the familial photographic archive. The project is a personal interpretation of the history of the Buryats, which highlights the Russian territorial expansion and its impact on the region and people's cultural identity. The work includes creating photographic responses to anthropological photographs of Indigenous Siberians that I found in Kunstkamera's ethnographic museum, where I would address the themes of representation, colonial gaze and historical erasure. I have started taking self-portraits that follow similar visual patterns to the ones of the museum archive and my family, then placing these images back into the historical frame creating a photographic intervention. For me, this is a way to open up a conversation about the contested nature of the written history of my people and a means of reversing the alienating narrative of otherness. The work is subdivided into 5 ‘Acts’: Nomads, Looking, Burial, Vanishing and Artefacts, where I would cover different cultural elements of Buryat identity.
