Biography
Working primarily with video but also with installation, photography and performance, Taus Makhacheva questions the unstable boundary between similarity and difference, acceptance and rejection, and draws attention to efforts to merge, mimic, assimilate or leak into what is other. She asks what actually remains from her country's past and how and in what forms it has been reintroduced into everyday life as part of the struggle to find a new identity for the country and its different ethnic groups.
Recent exhibitions of Makhacheva's work include the Venice Biennial (2017); Shanghai Biennial (2016); Kyiv Biennial, Kiev (2015); Moscow Biennial (2011, 2015); Sharjah Biennial 11 (2013); Liverpool Biennial (2012); Migrasophia, Maraya Art Centre, Sharjah (2012); Practice for Everyday Life, Calvert 22, London (2011) and History of Russian Video Art, Volume 3, Moscow Museum of Modern Art (2010).
She was awarded the Future of Europe Prize, Museum of Contemporary Art, Leipzig (2014) and the New Generation - Innovation Prize, National Centre for Contemporary Art, Moscow (2012). She was shortlisted for the Kandinsky Art Prize (2011).
Makhacheva holds a BA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London (2007) and an MFA from the Royal College of Art, London (2013).
Born in 1983 in Dagestan, Russia, she currently lives and works in Makhachkala and Moscow.
