Mari Bastashevski

Mari Bastashevski is an artist, writer and researcher. She was born in a country that no longer exists, the Soviet Union. She is currently based in Switzerland, but is rarely at home. Her work – usually a result of extensive online and field investigations – combines documents with photographs and texts and explores the intersections between individuals, corporations, and states. She has recently concluded a project, 10,000 Things Out of China, a work that navigates through the violent, complex and politically ambiguous culture of logistics by which products made in China reach Europe and the United States. Her other projects include: It’s Nothing Personal, an installation juxtaposing the technocratic language and neutral space of surveillance firms with the testimonies of individuals affected by surveillance technology.

And ZimTm, a self-reflective critique about an irrecon – cilable conflict of corporate sponsorship and critical practice, accompanied by an automaton stand-in for an artist with its own twitter account: twitter.com/ZimTm. Bastashevski’s work has been exhibited in France, the Netherlands, United States, Italy, Switzerland, Australia, and published in the NYT, Le Monde, NYT, Vice, among others. She was a 2016 World and ISP fellow at Yale and is a 2018 fellow at Data and Society. In 2011 she was awarded an artist in residency at Cité des Arts in France and in 2017 at IASPIS in Stockholm. She is a recipient of two Magnum Emergency grants from Magnum Foundation.