My name is Elina Kulikova, ( born in St. Petersburg, Russia). I am a theatre director and performance artist; a participant in international theatre festivals and laboratories. I graduated from the Liberal Arts and Sciences course at St. Petersburg State University and Bard College (NY, USA) in 2019.

As a performance artist I mainly make interactive and immersive performances and installations using different forms of text (literature, a sound score or even smells). In my work I combine conceptual and processual approaches.

I am exploring the boundaries of contemporary performative practices and creating multidisciplinary projects: performances for one viewer, weeks and months long performances, site-specific and digital performances. I believe that performance should create a special relationship between the spectator and the artist’s idea. This kind of a dialogue with the personality and the concept has its own way of unfolding and directing the work more than I ever could.
That is why I am working in the field of participatory art, creating projects in a sensitive aesthetic and calling on the viewer to activate olfactory and tactile perception.

Two contexts that I am constantly exploring are feminist and queer writing and their representation on the theatre stage. I direct texts and narratives that are not traditional for the drama theatre, supporting Russian female-writes. The second theme which is major in my practice is memory and its shapes and forms. I explore personal and collective female memory, physiological and corpopeal aspects of it (especially, olfactory memory). Due to this, auto-fiction, diaries and documentary novels have become genres I am very interested in.