Tatiana Fiodorova

Tatiana Fiodorova (b. 1976, Chișinău) was born and raised in Soviet Moldova. She completed a one-year preparatory course at the Polytechnical University of Moldova before studying in the graphics department of the "Ion Creangă" Pedagogical University in Chișinău, in the class of Simion Zamșa, earning a master's degree; after graduating she spent two years as a researcher at the Academy of Sciences of Moldova, where she was assigned to the study of book art. She worked for a year as a graphic designer and later taught drawing at the Șciusev Art School in Chișinău for over a decade.

Her formation as a contemporary artist took place in the 2000s, shaped in part by her collaboration with the [KSA:K] Center for Contemporary Art in Chișinău. Working across social practice, installation, live performance, public art, video, photography, and artists' books, she addresses questions of social and political history connected to the post-Soviet transition — the lost Soviet identity and the formation of a new identity for a Moldovan woman confronting social, political, and economic change. In the performance I Go (2010) she walked through Chișinău — and later Białystok, Bratislava, and Moscow — her body painted black, carrying a plaid shopping bag marked with the gold stars of the EU flag; the project Artist Without Pavilion (2011) responded to Moldova's absence of national representation at the Venice Biennale.

Family archives are central to her artist books: In Search of the Social Body of the Soviet Artist draws on the archive of her father, a Soviet-era artist who died when she was six; The Red Star (Steaua Roșie) is dedicated to her mother's twenty-five years of work at a Chișinău textile factory; and Only I Know How We Survived gathers drawings on toilet paper, an interview with the artist's mother, and stories of sellers at the flea market near the Chișinău railway station. Her books were presented at the Biennial of Contemporary Photography and Moving Image in Iași (2016) and in the solo exhibition When a Book Becomes a Message at the Future Museum in Bucharest (2016).

Fiodorova has exhibited internationally since 2008, including Periferic 8 Biennial in Iași (2008), Atlantis '11 with the [KSA:K] Center at the Venice Biennale (2011), Arsenal Gallery in Białystok (2014), Kalmar Konstmuseum (2011), the National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC) in Bucharest and MuseumsQuartier Wien (2015), and Constitution Hill in Johannesburg (2015), with solo exhibitions in Prague, Bucharest, Namur, Aarhus, and Iași. She has held residencies at FUTURA in Prague (2012), Badgast in The Hague/Scheveningen (2013), Q21/MuseumsQuartier in Vienna (2015), donumenta in Regensburg (2021), and the Künstler*innenhaus Büchsenhausen in Innsbruck (2023–2024). Her performance work is documented in Amy Bryzgel's study Performance Art in Eastern Europe since 1960 (2017).

Also active as a curator and educator, she co-curated (with Magda Kardasz) Waiting for Better Times at the Zachęta Project Room in Warsaw (2015) and the participatory project Pandemic, Ecology and Artist with the exhibition Breathing with One Voice in Chișinău (2020–2021), and in 2023 founded the Nomad Bureau for Art Research in Chișinău. In recent years she has worked under the name Tatiana Fiodorova-Lefter, presenting the solo exhibition Grădina Urzica / Nettle Garden at Galeria Plai in Chișinău (2025). She lives and works in Chișinău.