Mari Bastashevski is a photographer, writer, and researcher. Her installations combine texts, images, and documents to explore how corporate power and secrecy within systems of state contribute to the perpetuation of armed conflicts and conflicts of power between citizens and authorities.
Since 2010, Bastashevski has been working on “State Business,” an interdisciplinary investigative work that maps the expansion of the commercial cyber-surveillance industry, the rise of private military contractors in the Horn of Africa, and simultaneous transfers of weapons to opposing sides in regional armed conflicts. Her other ongoing series, “It’s Nothing Personal,” is a collection of PR material produced by global surveillance firms juxtaposed against the testimonies of those directly affected by their technologies. Her 2014 project, “Empty With a Whiff of Blood and Fumes,” addresses the nexus of money, power, and organized crime in Ukraine. Between 2007 and 2010, Bastashevski worked in the Russian North Caucasus on “File-126,” a work about the mass abduction of civilians under the guise of a counterterrorism campaign.
Her works have been exhibited at Musée de l’Elysée, HKW Berlin, Art Souterrain, Noorderlicht, the Open Society Foundations, Polaris Gallery, and East Wing, and have been published by Prix Pictet, Time Magazine, The New York Times, Courrier International, Le Monde, IBTimes, and VICE, amongst others. She was a finalist for the first edition of the Prix Elysée, held a 2011 residency at the Cité des Arts, and was awarded a Magnum Emergency Grant in 2012. In 2016, she was named a Yale World Fellow, and concluded her latest project, as an artist-in-residence aboard a commercial container ship. Bastashevski is represented by Galerie Polaris in Paris, France and by the Stead Bureau in the Hague, Netherlands.
