“Holy Playthings” by Marina Orlova
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Title: Holy Playthings Medium: Performance video, spoken word, sculptural installation Artist: Marina Orlova Year: 2025 Description: Holy Playthings is a ritual of unmaking—part exorcism, part funeral, part rebellion. Set in a forest, the artist constructs her own crucifix from raw wood and nails discarded teddy bears to it, their bodies soaked in black spray paint. The act is not nostalgic—it’s surgical. Brutal. Sacred. Through spoken word and performance, Orlova unearths the trauma of post-Soviet girlhood, where toys turned into trade and innocence was drowned—literally, as remembered through a neighbor’s act of drowning kittens. Here, she repeats the ritual with new meaning: a baptism not into purity, but into power. This is not a plea. It is a reckoning. Contact me art@hotforwords.com https://marinaorlova.com https://hotforwords.com/