Oksana Kazmina

Oksana Kazmina urrently lives and works in Kyiv. She graduated from the faculties of Journalism and Film and Television in Ukraine and now is the Art Video MFA candidate in Syracuse, USA. Kazmina also teaches basics of video production at  Kyiv Academy of Media Arts, Kyiv, Ukraine and Syracuse University, Syracuse, USA.

Since 2016 Kazmina has been working on her debut feature Underwater. Underwater is a long term exploration of everyday practices of dealing with the patriarchy. It registers different aspects of life and work of four (including Kazmina herself) Ukrainian artists AntiGonna (Kyiv-Vinnytsia- Odesa), Masha Pronina (Donetsk-Mariupol) and Ksenia Platanoiva (Zaporizhzhia). Underwater is also group online exhibition curated by the Ukrainian artist and curator Valentyna Petrova and film producer Yulia Serdyukova.

The exhibition revises the questions of power relations within the film Underwater in particular and documentary film industry in general. Underwater is inspired by another project of Kazmina, The backstage histories. Daily routine, festive rituals and other bodily practices of some unfitted groups of Ukrainians. Incompetent and loose field study, Kyiv, Ukraine, 2014-2020.

These two projects map Oksana’s main interests and practices starting from 2014, they interconnect and grow horizontally as different collaborations between its participants arise. In this way, these fluid projects expand and mutate over time giving rise to another projects and practices, such as artistic collective OKCAHAS  (together with AntiGonna) and interdisciplinary project Body Practices (together with Anatoliy Bielov)  Besides, recently Oksana has released the first album of her and Vasyl’ Tkachenko’s music project Serviz Propav.