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Home Sweet Hospital (2018 - ongoing)

Our TB hospitals are not like in the West. All patients are forced to stay for at least 6 month, some patients even live there for many years. They feel more like dirty dormitories run by nurses. Patients like to decorate their corners. I remember putting some posters on the walls and a carpet near my bed on the floor. This kind of experience traumatizes you, but it also gives some new vision of life. You realize that even a hospital can become your home, and you may even enjoy it. It gives you a combination of feelings that are not suppose to come together. Being close to death and laughing with your chamber mates, always on the edge of conflicting feelings. Even though you are scared, you adapt. Trying to make something good out of strange circumstances.

Home Sweet Hospital is performative installation, where I use painting mixed with other media. I compare the hospital to a normal apartment, where I turn a chamber into a bedroom, procedure cabinet into a kitchen or lobby into the living room. My hospital is not scary, it becomes a warm cozy place, no different from our homes, but still a drop counter or a white metal bed can remind you of the presence of imminent death. It is a small society, no different from the others, but totally closed off from the outside world.

Unlike my previous project "Hold your breath”, there are no portraits. As a viewer you should be alone, like you are at home. My work transports you to the world of a TB patient, and makes you equal.

Paulina Siniatkina, painting

Each bed of each patient becomes a separate portrait. Even the sheets fold in a particular way unique to each bed. Beds are empty I leave that space for a viewer. You can imagine what kind of person is laying there: it is a religious person, he/she is quite neat...or maybe it is you?

Chamber # 12 2019
Solo show, contemporary art space Cube.Moscow

Bedroom series, Endlessness installation (2 paintings from the series and installation were made during one month in the art residency in Cube.Moscow)

Project of Paulina Siniatkina, awarded with the grant from MOCT Contemporary Russia Arts Foundation, embodies performative installation “Chamber # 12”, originating from the personal story of the artist. The chamber # 12 is Paulina’s chamber where she spent half-year fighting tuberculosis in 2015. Within this work’s framework, she reflects upon the issues of stigma and invisibility of “abnormal” life, open discussion around which is considered a social taboo. (Daria Demekhina , curator)

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