Born in Northern Russia in 1988, Lada Neoberdina has been living and working in France since 2005.
After obtaining the Master’s degree City Space Design with honours at the High School of Fine Arts in Le Mans (France) in 2013, she has developed a multidisciplinary artistic practice : textile art, urban art, performance, installation, writing. She participated in multiple projects : solo shows and group exhibitions, artist residencies, collaborative projects in dance, theater or cinema, workshops, talks and teaching both in France and abroad (Russia, Switzerland, USA, Germany, Iran, Singapore, Belgium).
The year 2020 is marked by the curatorial project - a carte blanche at La Manufacture, museum of textile memory and textile design in Roubaix (France) for the project Embroidery : the starting point.
The year 2021 started with a research residency at the Ferme-Asile art center in Sion (Switzerland), and continued with the studies at La Cambre, Visual Arts school in Brussels (Belgium).
In 2022, Lada Neoberdina also teached at Paris College of Art (Fine Arts / Mixed Media Textile section) in Paris (France).
She lives and works in Saint-Paul-de-Vence (France).
Lada Neoberdina’s practice develops in different media of contemporary art. Her portfolio includes installations, performance, photography, video, as well as multidisciplinary projects. A graduate of the program «Design of urban space» at the Ecole Supérieure des Beaux Arts Le Mans, the artist is particularly interested in the relationships between textile (especially embroideries) and various public spaces. A special role in the artist’s practice belongs to techniques of classical patchwork, which are rethought in the perspective of contemporary feminist criticism.
The main subject is the historical opposition of high and low art, the contrast of free creative activity and decorative art and patchwork, disciplines that were seen as a natural labour and familial responsibility, an exclusively female, home-based work.
In inventing her own genre of urban embroidery (fr. broderie urbaine) Lada Neoberdina chooses the aggressive urban space (a masculine space) as the main place of work instead of the sweet home. She transposes this domestic activity from the living room into the streets. It is an impermissible impudent act of the needlewoman, an act of resistance that becomes a strong gesture of protest. Not only does Neoberdina expose her work to the public gaze, but she also endangers the stainless whiteness of the fabric. The exit from the home into the streets is a political act, civil insubordination, a violation of the order - to stay at home.
For the series Broderie Urbaine the artist chooses generalized images borrowed from the silhouettes of the city’s crowd, and endows them with a special value. Golden threads on white background portray figures - a man in a hat, a musician playing an accordion, a woman carrying bags. We face a work in progress, however, not as a kind of process-oriented art broadly used in contemporary art, but as an interrupted activity - and that is where the embroidery gets its feeling of incompleteness and sketchiness.
The work comes to us in all fragility and vulnerability. It contradicts the classical paradigm: the embroidery has to be a completed, harmonic composition of applied quality, a decoration of a perfectly kept home. In this classical view, it is irrelevant to talk about personal style (i.e. the author’s presence) or about visible marks of handwork; such female labor does not deserve mention or display.
A crucial role belongs to the lace-frames — an attribute of painstaking work is doomed to be excluded conceptually. Exhibiting the work on the lace-frames emphasizes their objectness linking to the problem of objectification of the female body and demonstrating the embroideries beyond the fulfilment of their applied function. The works are liberated from their decorative purpose in the same way that is the female.
Anastasia PATSEY
Director of Nonconformist Art Museum and St.Petersburg Art Residency
Exhibition catalogue Transpositions II: How We Find Our Ways To Transcendental Homelessness
11.03.2017 - 09.04.2017
St.Petersburg, Russia