Welcome to the brand new Arthive! Discover a full list of new features here.

Leni
Smoragdova

Israel • London • born in 1987 • artist
“This story is about how I create the Labyrinth of Worlds Transaction Art. And to be honest, this is a diary of my life. The time comes and I completely rewrite the concept of Transaction Art - everything that I believed in before now seems to me naive and irrelevant, and so every five years ”- $ M
TransactionArt

I really like the Torah, namely that each of its researchers finds a new reading and interpretation of the meanings. Probably, I would like people, studying what I am doing, to go the same way, namely to find those secret meanings that are close to him. If you do everything too straightforward and explain in too much detail, then the Transaction maze will lose its relevance.

It all started with the slogan: “We are children of war, war is money, money has no face, it’s as simple as Transaction, we are children of Transaction, we are children without a face” - {$ M}.
In the original it sounds like this: “We are the children of the war, the war is money, money has no faces, it's so simple as Transaction. We are the children with hidden faces, we are the children of the Transaction. "

Transaction art originated in London, when I already realized, I covered the faces of my people. This is how the hidden faces appeared. During this period appeared: "Collection of Figures".

Transaction Art was officially presented in Amsterdam as part of a performance. Then on the floor of the church, where I was allocated a "site", I saw a slab with the inscription {$ M}. $ M - on this slab means that the slab belonged to some European eminent family. You can find this church in Amsterdam and see for yourself that this slab was hardly removed.
$ M is SM + L = {$ M}. But I had this signature created even before my arrival in Amsterdam. I took it as a sign from above. https://youtu.be/Ai8DKitwBk4

This was followed by short films: "Stories of the entrails in a short retelling"
https://youtu.be/qMZCiectaH4 and video art: https://youtu.be/JwsH6E7Bdpw. The main theme of all these works is hidden faces. In fact, these are stories about the dead, and their restless souls. Gehennom remember? - that's exactly about that.

Once I saw a video on the Internet: In the city of Yekaterinburg, a girl passed out from the cold while waiting for public transport. I got a piss in my head, and I decided to save Russia through art, and to develop the theory of hidden faces. So the project was created: "Inglourious Basterds: # Warm Stops." For two years no one knew who the author of this project was. And I confirmed my theory of TransactionArt and hidden faces. “Inglourious Basterds: # Warm Stops - 6 years long actionism. You know this story well, or you can easily find information about it.

# MazeTransaction. The scale was not enough for me, and I introduced fashion to art. #TransactionInFashion. This project spilled over into the "History of Special Beauty".

"The dismembered body finds unity in the image of another: let's play Gd." In the meantime, the TransactionArt beasts were born.

Performances / installations:
• “Eggs TransactionArt” - installations. On the one hand, these are the heads of my people: hidden faces, on the other, the eggs from which the animals emerged.
• "Error" - a series of 10 installations. 2020 “Error”: I was thinking about Vivienne Westwood and genetic engineering. This is a group of 10 animals in aquariums casting an “Error” shadow. I thought that in the period of the 4th technical revolution, each new discovery leads to the displacement of a person into the background. Each new invention is a black box, a "mistake" leading nowhere.
• “Please, mind the Gap: #TransactionInSelfie” - in 2020 the whole world became the heroes of the TransactionArt world. The project was created in 2016 in Italy and moved very slowly until 2020. The project turned out to be prophetic. - {$ M}
https://instagram.com/transaction_

Selected list of projects and exhibitions:
1. "Figures collection: light version, dark version, color": photos
2. "The dismembered body finds unity in the image of another: let's play Gd": graphic sheets
3. “To get to the museum you need to undress”: collages.
4. "Inglourious Basterds: Warm Stops": social art project.
5. "Labyrinths of Transaction": performances.
6. "That which cannot be hidden: portraits of power": collages
7. "Error": installation
8. "All that remains after you": collages
9. Transaction in Selfie
10. Dollhouse
11. Cooperation with various types of business: jewelry, flower, fashion industry.
Go to biography

Publication

View all publications

Exhibitions

All exhibitions of the artist
View all artist's artworks
Whole feed