Inesa Markava

Artist statement

Inesa was born in Minsk, Belarus, country with many beautiful lakes and forests. Since very young, she started her studies in dance and music. In 2002, she entered to the University of Culture and Arts in Minsk where she learned theatre, art, management, music and art activities organization. At the University, she met dance department students and the passion of many years started to gain form: contemporary dance, new choreography languages, and searching for another way of body expression become the main interest to discover and develop.

In 2005, she won one year exchange scholarship in Portugal, and worked within an international cultural program team in Leiria. In her free time, she undertook contemporary and classical dance classes at Clara Leão Dance School, and after the first public performance she was invited to work with the School of Arts and Concerts for Babies project in Leiria. Within these two projects, Inesa danced on the stages of Bilbao Philharmonic Orchestra, Antwerp Theater (Lause Poliphoniae Festival), Mercat de Las Flors in Barcelona, Gulbenkian Festival in Kent, Graz Arts Festival, Philharmonic of Luxemburg (Atlantic Festival), Théâtre de la Ville (Festival Chantiers d’Europe, Paris), among many others.
In 2010 she finished her Artistic Studies degree and started a Master in Cultural Politics at the University of Coimbra with the theme “Museums and Education through Art”. In 2016, she started her PhD in Contemporary Art at Colégio das Artes, University of Coimbra, concluding it in 2021 with the thesis entitled “Territory between. Dance in the exhibition space”.

In 2018 she participated in the Festival “Abril, Dança em Coimbra” with the performance “Territory Between: permeable space” within Pedro Figueredo´s exhibition of sculpture at Convent of St Francisco, Coimbra. That same year, she got selected to perform her piece “The Garden” at Biennale of Contemporary Art in Cerveira. Still in 2018, she directed Musicalmente Festival | 20 years of Concerts for Babies.
Since 2016, she has worked with Museu de Leiria, Museum of Moving Image, Moinho de Papel (where her project “Moinho Imaginário” was born in 2019), Banco das Artes Gallery, Arquivo Gallery, José Saramago Library, and Leiria European Capital of Culture Candidacy, operating upon the artistic-cultural mediation of contents and heritage through the language of contemporary dance.

The Imaginary Museums addresses the theme of dance, movement and body in the exhibition space. Through this project, we explore the dynamic relationships between dance and other arts with a special emphasis on the exhibition contexts. Since permeability is one of the basic concepts, we look at choreography in the museological space as a multimedia work, the body in motion as a filter, and contextualize the idea of subtle communication as the mediation vehicle for museological involvement. We look at museological spaces as creative places and territories where the body in movement enters into a dialogue with the exhibition, the space, visitors and as a result, the new forms of relationship and artistic mediation find their fulfillment.
The greatest challenge of this project is to bring together, in a theoretical and conceptual way, but also through creative practice, a temporal and ephemeral art such as dance alongside and in permanent dialogue with the visual art and architecture works of the exhibition space.