THE FOCUS View all posts from The Focus

In film, video, sculpture, and installation, I explore the relationships between personal, collective, and official memories as they unfold in history, cityscape, and across national borders. Often, I employ my own body and subjective position in order to investigate questions of translation and belonging.

I was a Soviet citizen; I am a U.S. citizen; the status of my Russian citizenship is uncertain. I take this site of translation—trans-national, trans-historical, linguistic, and fictional—as generative; and negotiate these messy and often conflicting affiliations by embodying and disrupting their received visual, textual, and material remnants.

An image, a text, or a moment in history act as a gateway to narratives of displacement, longing, homemaking, and homecoming. My works slips between scales, from micro to macro in the same breath, from intimate personal recollection to monolithic world history, in an attempt to ask, and possibly begin to answer the question: by reading the present in an image of the past, can we begin to see the future in images of the present?

- Masha Vlasova, 2017

Masha Vlasova works in film, video, and installation. Masha received her BFA at the Cooper Union in 2012 and her MFA from Yale University in 2016. She's a recipient the Fulbright Fellowship in Filmmaking, Alice Kimball Traveling Fellowship, and JUNCTURE Art and Human Rights Initiative Fellowship at Yale Law School.

Her photographs, videos, and objects have been exhibited at La MaMa La Galleria and Abrons Arts Center in New York, Leeds College of Art, UK, Vox Populi in Philadelphia, ArtSpace in New Haven, and at Van Every/Smith Galleries, Davidson, NC. She has presented on her work at Ludwig-Maximilians Unversitat Munchen (University of Munich) in Germany, Temple University, and University of Tennessee at Knoxville. She currently teaches at University of Tennessee, Chattanooga. mashavlasova.info

* select images courtesy of the artist