This work was made for WOWMEN! Festival at Kaaitheater in 2020, and produced by workspacebrussels. That year, the festival took place under the phrase Don’t protect me, respect me. The deliberately provocative title (female russian...) refers to my marriage to Anyuta. Unlike me, Anyuta needed residence papers. The title invents another motive for the marriage: that I married her in order to build a successful career as an artist. This reversal is central to the work, placing two women within a structure historically associated with male artistic power: the artist and the female muse.

 

The work emerged from the bureaucratic reality surrounding our marriage. In the year before we married, we received repeated, unannounced visits from the police. They entered our home to investigate whether we were genuinely living together, looking for evidence such as the

number of toothbrushes and towels we had, where our belongings were kept, and other details that might prove that our relationship was real. Our private home became a site of inspection, and intimacy was turned into something that had to be demonstrated and verified.

 

This experience became material for the work. At its centre, Anyuta lies on a round bed we had bought together. We had heard that during such inspections, couples might be asked which side of the bed each person slept on. A round bed made this question impossible to answer. The bed became both a practical response to bureaucratic scrutiny and an absurd domestic object that exposed the logic of having to prove intimacy.

 

Anyuta lies on the bed in silk underwear, reading Proust. This refers to a quote attributed to Jane Birkin: My mother was right: When you’ve got nothing left, all you can do is get into silk underwear and start reading Proust. The quote and gesture of Anyuta suggests how femininity

and cultural sophistication can become resources in situations where care, shelter, and economic security depend on others. The title also reverses the familiar figure of the female muse, historically positioned as the source of inspiration behind the male artist. Here, the

woman artist claims the position of the ambitious artist who instrumentalises another woman.

 

Presented at a feminist festival, the work uses this absurd proposition to question the gendered structures surrounding artistic ambition and the figure of the muse.

 

Furthermore, the three carpets hanging in front of wooden panels again contributes to the idea of home. In Russian domestic interiors, carpets were traditionally hung on walls as well as placed on floors, partly providing insulation in cold homes. Their presence also carried certain superstitions. According to one belief, attaching a carpet directly to the wall with nails could

bring conflict into the family. Loops were therefore sewn onto the carpet so that it could be hung from them. This belief gives the carpets a particular place within the work. The way a carpet is hung becomes connected to the stability of the household. The carpets introduce the language of the domestic interior into a space that is not a home. They create a temporary sense of intimacy and enclosure without fully separating that space from its surroundings. Rather than representing the home, they reproduce some of its conditions — softness, proximity,

familiarity.

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Presented in the public hall of Kaaitheater as part of an arts festival, this work. complicates the distinction between private life and public performance. The work ultimately turns marriage into a space where bureaucracy, intimacy, gender, migration, artistic ambition, and economic dependency intersect.