Anna Morozova

Graduate Student/Research Assistant

In 2022, I finished my bachelor’s degree in Cultural Studies and began a master’s program in the same field. My research concentrated on the way people perceive information. My bachelor’s thesis was stated on the theme which has interested me a lot–I provided profound research on the history of communication systems, who discovered the first ones, what is the reason and, what’s the most difficult and interesting, how these investigations in a cyberand technical world influenced on artistic approach to portray anything. Starting from the second year of learning at university I began to work as an English Language Teacher in a private school. The key point was when I realized that a lot depends on the visual aspect.

Even when people hear information they use their imagination to reproduce it inwardly. One and a half years later, I started to work at the contemporary art gallery The Naked Room as a manager. It was great to know and find out why the same picture can be understood oppositely by different people. There were where theory and experience met in my research and I contributed it to the thesis.Aside from this, my last projects demanded a high level of understanding of the operating systems as well as their contribution to visuality. I was working on the archive of the artistic couple Viktor Zaretskiy and Alla Horska, who was allegedly murdered by the KGB. Some of the results of the work were published by the media SupportYourArt. Archive work implies a lot of problems with the organization of information, its structural architecture as well as its visual setup. I continued to work with archives and was also responsible for creating the curatorial archive of Maria Lanko and Lizaveta German, Ukrainian curators and researchers. But, as the war began, I lost two of my jobs and my education also stopped.

As a research assistant at the Kule Folklore Centre I am interested in Ukrainian cultural diversity and its contribution to the international scene. My major is Media and Cultural Studies and I’ve worked for 2 years at the contemporary art gallery “The Naked Room” in my homeland of Ukraine. While working there and being a student at the University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy I was amused by the amount of unexplored Ukrainian artists and their practices. Such names as Alla Horska and Viktor Zaretskiy should be known by everyone in Ukraine as well as Taras Shevchenko. I think we need to work under the brand and the representation of Ukraine more actively, because we have a lot to show, but first we also have to promote our abundant heritage throughout Ukrainian citizens, teaching at school more widely about the culture we live in. I feel like my purpose can be to change something in the educational system in Ukraine, because the programs, approaches, etc. at schools and universities aren’t suitable anymore for the modern world.

Email: amorozov@ualberta.ca