In your work you often use oil and blood, where from and how do you manage to get these materials?

Blood and oil are both currencies of war and genocide. I use industrial materials to pump the liquid through this cycle. When people donate their blood to my sculptures, the work is instantly politicised. I never use my blood, my liquid or personality because I was born in a militarist country in a totalitarian regime. I use the language of everyone. Words such as ‘Democracy’, ‘Capitalism’ and ‘Human Rights’ are filled with either blood from a specific group of people or oil from a region of conflict – Iran, Iraq etc. The material fills and transforms these concepts into something different, something new.

What does art mean to you and how would you describe your practice?

I was born is a small city in the snow in the north of Russia. When I was 9 or 10 I used to put many metal nails on the railroad under the train and was surprised how the train flattened them. I began putting more and more things on the track; money, metal buttons. They became squashed in different ways. I became so curious I used bigger and bigger things – but then one day we crashed the train. My mother had to check me into the police station ever month because I was on the black list for terrible children. This memory stays with me until now – I still try to understand what it is to transform an object into something else, to take from one world and transform into another.

What effect do you think your art has on people?

I have questions about why people have to give their blood for an ideology or a sentence, that’s why I use and move this experience. I propose for them the same idea – if you want to give your blood for an ideology, maybe you will give it to art or for another thing that you’re free to choose. It’s essential to put people in front of difficult choices, a shame situation that they are not used to discussing – like nationalism, blood, violence and death. In Capitalism, people try to smile, hide and pretend death does not exist, while it exists somehow in other countries. They don’t want to accept that the colonial world they grew up in ruined countries and people.