Yulia Pinkusevich

Sakha Aesthesis (2021)

Solo Exhibition at MinEastry of PostCollapse Art, Portland Oregon

July 23- September 29th 2021

MinEastry of Postcollapse Art and Culture is pleased to present Sakha Aesthesis, a solo exhibition by Yulia Pinkusevich.

What escapes erasure? Can the ancient enunciate the present? What are the knowledges, practices, and sensibilities that persist and spill over despite the flattened aesthetics of Eurocentric contemporaneity? 

Argentinian cultural scholar, Walter Mignolo, describes decolonial aesthesis as an expansion of the senses that resist and persist despite colonial modernity. Aesthesis, not aesthetics, inspire Indigenous practices to surge forth a multisensory realm of knowing, feeling, and living in the world. Urging memories, skills, and forgotten knowledges, aesthesis is no longer bracketed as folklore or myth, but is centered as the vantage of a radically decolonial contemporary art critique.

Oakland-based artist, Yulia Pinkusevich’s research-based and deeply personal presentation of the Sakha Earth, Mother, and Air spirit worlds pays homage to the Sakha peoples’ ecoharmonious relationship between nature and humanity.  When Stalin's regime systematically purged shamanism in the 1920s, a multigenerational amnesia around native heritage and sacred practices afflicted the region of Siberia. For Pinkusevich’s own family, this amnesia left the remnants of what seemed like strange, forgotten superstitions. In five large pastel paintings paired with a sculpture of a snake suspended from the gallery ceiling, Pinkusevich transforms the gallery into a rich sensory experience emblematic of Sakha decolonial aesthesis. Together, Pinkusevich’s works suture the folds and undo the divides between ancient and contemporary, material and spiritual, and feeling and knowing through a glimpse into the continuing practices of the arctic Sakha peoples.