Творчество Ленины Никитиной как форма визуализации культурной памяти

Abstract

In modern cultural studies, there is an increased interest in biography as a phenomenon associated with cultural memory. Subjective experience, the eff ect of getting used to someone else’s life allows the viewer to feel the personality of another, not like him as a valuable cultural experience. Lenina Nikitina is a Leningrad artist,a Petersburg artist whose work, unfortunately, is familiar to a small circle of viewers. The talent of the author was able to turn the events of his personal life into a cultural, artistic event. The works of Lenina Nikitina are relevant for the modern audience as a vivid example of the development of the ideas of fi gurative expressionism and asan example of visualizing the cultural memory of an entire era through a creative understanding of the events of her life and as documentary evidence of events of the history of the twentieth century, including the Siege of Leningrad. The artist’s talent launches the mechanism of bodily assimilation into what is happening, empathy givesthe image credibility, makes it immerse into it as what is happening here-and-now. In this case, the painting is more documentary than, for example, photography or video. The aff ectiveness of experience becomes not only a way of bodily comprehension, sensation of the past, but it can become an experience infl uencing here-and-now, personal cultural experience. Cultural memory in such a context can be seen as an interweaving of clumps of individual stories and experiences, not all of which correspond to the usual appearance of the historical period or the image of the event in the media, aff ecting our being here and now.