Biography
Aleksey Shchigalev was born in the village of Ust'-Chernaya, Perm Krai. He graduated from Ural Federal University with a degree in metallurgical machinery and equipment. He began as a graffiti artist. In 2014, together with other street artists, he opened an artists run space. From 2018 to 2020, he studied at the I. Bakstein Institute of Contemporary Art. Since 2023 he lives and works in Paris, France.
Artist statement
I am an interdisciplinary artist and researcher whose practice revolves around the ways societies construct, preserve, and contest memory. I explore how private and collective recollections coexist – at times synchronically, at times diachronically – and how these memories materialize as archives, documents, and infrastructures. My work examines how remembrance is mediated, reshaped, or erased, and how these processes inform the cultural habitus of our present.
Methodologically, I engage with analysis, recombination, and re-signification of found materials: photographic records, bureaucratic documents, personal testimonies, and discarded objects. By translating fragments from one medium into another I expose the shifting boundary between figure and ground, tool and subject. This process highlights the entanglement of power and knowledge in the production of official interpretations of reality, whether in maps, diagrams, encyclopedias, or infrastructures that structure everyday life.
Alongside archival research, I investigate infrastructures that have lost their function through social, political, or economic change. Airports, industrial sites, and communication networks become allegories of displacement and disorientation, where the erosion of material systems mirrors the fragility of collective bonds and historical orientation. These spaces and their residues are recomposed into installations that challenge the ways in which cultural narratives are built upon ruins.
My training as an engineer shapes the tools and processes I use. CNC machines and mechanical translations of archival material underscore how memory is never direct, but always refracted through systems of mediation.
What ties my work together is a commitment to re-interpretation: shifting contexts, collapsing distinctions, and reworking inherited codes. Through this process, I seek to reveal how power and knowledge are inscribed in archives and infrastructures, while creating spaces where overlooked histories can resurface – making visible the fragile interplay between private voices and collective memory.
Aleksey Shchigalev was born in the village of Ust'-Chernaya, Perm Krai. He graduated from Ural Federal University with a degree in metallurgical machinery and equipment. He began as a graffiti artist. In 2014, together with other street artists, he opened an artists run space. From 2018 to 2020, he studied at the I. Bakstein Institute of Contemporary Art. Since 2023 he lives and works in Paris, France.
Artist statement
I am an interdisciplinary artist and researcher whose practice revolves around the ways societies construct, preserve, and contest memory. I explore how private and collective recollections coexist – at times synchronically, at times diachronically – and how these memories materialize as archives, documents, and infrastructures. My work examines how remembrance is mediated, reshaped, or erased, and how these processes inform the cultural habitus of our present.
Methodologically, I engage with analysis, recombination, and re-signification of found materials: photographic records, bureaucratic documents, personal testimonies, and discarded objects. By translating fragments from one medium into another I expose the shifting boundary between figure and ground, tool and subject. This process highlights the entanglement of power and knowledge in the production of official interpretations of reality, whether in maps, diagrams, encyclopedias, or infrastructures that structure everyday life.
Alongside archival research, I investigate infrastructures that have lost their function through social, political, or economic change. Airports, industrial sites, and communication networks become allegories of displacement and disorientation, where the erosion of material systems mirrors the fragility of collective bonds and historical orientation. These spaces and their residues are recomposed into installations that challenge the ways in which cultural narratives are built upon ruins.
My training as an engineer shapes the tools and processes I use. CNC machines and mechanical translations of archival material underscore how memory is never direct, but always refracted through systems of mediation.
What ties my work together is a commitment to re-interpretation: shifting contexts, collapsing distinctions, and reworking inherited codes. Through this process, I seek to reveal how power and knowledge are inscribed in archives and infrastructures, while creating spaces where overlooked histories can resurface – making visible the fragile interplay between private voices and collective memory.