Masha Godovannaya

For the kültüř gemma! grant, Masha Godovannaya realized the project “Rituals of Relatedness: Margins of Queer Kinship and beyond”, which traces and redefines margins of contemporary queer kinships lived through and practiced by local communities of queers who had/are having experiences of migration and/or parenting. Conceived as a participatory art-based project (from/for/together with the communities) it asked questions of queer relatedness/mutuality of being, child/children upbringing, solidarity, and support, and offered to reconfigure concepts of “queerness” outside of western (predominantly white and Anglo-Saxon) paradigms.

Masha Godovannaya is a visual artist, queer-feminist social researcher, university lecturer, post-Soviet subject, and mother with diverse backgrounds of ideological displacement (permanent migration, marginal cinematic forms, and queer-feminist artivism). Her multiple identities and broad interdisciplinary interests allow her to move across disciplines, media, formats, and different political, social, and artistic worlds.

As a practicing artist, she has worked with visual media for over two decades, viewing her films and installations as audiovisual experiences that blend personal, subjective elements with more concrete observations of the outside world and socio-political contexts. She approaches art production as a collective action. Her artistic practice is closely linked to artistic research and draws on approaches such as moving image theory, social science, queer theory, decolonial methodologies, feminist studies and contemporary art.