Press Release August 20, 2014

The Joseph Brodsky Fellowship Fund is pleased to announce the 2014 fellowships in poetry and the visual arts. The fellowship in poetry has been awarded to Mikhail Yeremin and the fellowship in the visual arts has been awarded to Natalia Pershina Yakimanskaya. The fellowships will enable Mr. Yeremin and Ms. Pershina Yakimanskaya to spend the fall of 2014 in Rome, studying classical and contemporary Italian culture, developing their own projects, and interacting with artists and scholars from other parts of the world. In addition, Ms. Pershina Yakimanskaya will be able to live and work in Venice thanks to the Fund’s partnership with the Emily Harvey Foundation.

Born in Leningrad, Pershina Yakimanslaya (also known as Gluklya) lives and works in St Petersburg and Amsterdam. Shortly after graduating from the Mukhina Academy of Art and Design, she became a co-founder of an artist collective The Factory of Found Clothes which uses installation, performance, video, text and ’social research’ to illustrate the concept of “fragile” — relationships between internal and external and private and public. In 2002, they wrote their manifesto: “The place of the artist is at the side of the weak.” Gluklya’s work has been exhibited in Russia and abroad, including at the VOLTA8, Basel (2012); MUMOK, Vienna (2012); Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden Baden (2011); Shedhalle, Zurich (2011); SMART Project Space, Amsterdam (2011); Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid (2011); Kunsthalle, Vienna (2011); ICA, London (2010); National Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow (2006).

Our Poetry Fellow, Mikhail Yeremin, lives and works in St. Petersburg. He is the author of six volumes of poetry which he deliberately named “Poems” and a recipient of the Andrei Bely Prize, the oldest independent literary award in Russia. In his interview to Radio Liberty, he describes his literary circle: “We were absolutely free and curious about the world. Freedom and knowledge were very important to us. Finally - we were artists. Actually, strike ‘were:’ while we are still alive, we are artists.”

Joseph Brodsky was a Nobel Laureate in Literature and a distinguished poet and essayist in his native Russia, as well as his second home in the West. The Joseph Brodsky Fellowship Fund provides Russian artists and writers with periods of work and study in Italy. The Fund had its origins in 1995, when Joseph Brodsky conferred with the mayor of Rome about creating a ""Russian Academy in Rome,"" where Russian artists and writers could revive the once vibrant Russian tradition of artistic pilgrimage to Italy. The Fund was officially established in 1996, soon after Brodsky’s death, by a group of his friends dedicated realizing his vision. In 2000, the Fund began sending poetry fellows to Rome and, in 2002, fellowships for visual artists were added. To date, the Fund has supported fellowships for more than twenty poets and visual artists. The Joseph Brodsky Fellowship Fund is a nonprofit organization supported by individual donors and independent foundations. The Fund is most grateful to its donors for giving Mr. Brodsky's vision this continuing life. Contact: Masha Pyshkina.

Joseph Brodsky Fellowship Fund
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