Vika Begalska
Victoria Begalskaya (also Vika Begalska) is originally from Dnepropetrovsk (now Dnipro), Ukraine. She graduated from the Kharkiv Academy of Design and Arts, and she now works in Moscow as a painter and film artist. In her films, Begalskaya makes a parody of familiar situations taken from daily life in Russia and Ukraine. Creating mocking, folkloric montages, she provides the viewer with a pitiless perspective on what social reality looks like in the Post-Soviet Era. In 2014, she founded Teresa Creative Union of Sex-Workers and Artists, a joint project in partnership with streetwalkers from Saint Petersburg. Together they developed a puppet theatre using cardboard cut-out figures, paintings and objects, where encounters between sex workers and their clients are staged, given a shape in which the tragedy of the theme always hovers between the moral and the cheerfully debauched.