NATASHA YUDINA BIOGRAPHY
Siberian artist Natasha Yudina (born Tomsk, Russia, 1982) has a delightfully straightforward reason for wrapping her sculptures in fur: it’s very cold in Tomsk! So ‘art in Siberia needs to be warmed up’. That foregrounds fur’s comforting aspect. But, as she points out, the brute fact is that it’s the skin of a dead animal – or person: it is estimated that there were over 400,000 political prisoners in Siberia in the 1930’s: 130,000 of them were shot, quite apart from those who starved or succumbed to the cold and disease. Her sculptures have a savage potential for irony.
