Taus Makhacheva

Taus Makhacheva grew up in Moscow but her family is from Dagestan, in the North Caucasus region of Russia. Her interest in the complex relationship between history, politics of memory and contemporary life, serves as starting point for most of her works. Makhacheva’s medium of choice is moving image but she also works with performance, installations, photographs and objects, exploring and reflecting on themes and imagery from art history, anthropology, cultural and social studies. The artist often turns her attention to the traditions of her multi-ethnic place of origin before Sovietisation, not in a nostalgic way but rather to capture the processes of mixing, borrowing and assimilation, of interaction between the familiar and the alien. In that sense, Makhacheva’s works oppose the official ideological claim for cultural authenticity and investigate instead the re-invented traditions and the newly created rituals of late capitalism that are supposed to help consolidate the post-soviet Dagestan society.