XL Gallery presents Ekaterina Muromtseva's exhibition "How to Become Invisible". The eponymous series of works, created between 2020 and 2022, is a reflection on the invisibility and presence of the human being in the context of the cultural sphere and global historical processes.

 In her works Ekaterina Muromtseva addresses the themes of individual and collective memory, the dynamics of the present and the past, and the ways in which they can be documented and presented. In Muromtseva's works, characters and images are often intertwined in a series of images that resemble social media feeds, where tragic incidents and news reports coexist with random fragments of someone's personal life. The artist's works serve as a reflection of contemporary history, with its acute socio-political crises and transformations in a society divided by borders and time zones.

 The "How to Become Invisible" series was initiated in Zagreb, shortly before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. According to Muromtseva, while working on the series, she invited cultural workers from various fields to her studio and talked with them about the conditions of their work, which is indispensable but often invisible. "The cultural sector is extremely vulnerable and unstable," the artist notes, "and it is characterized by widespread unpaid labor, precariousness, and exploitation for the sake of being closer to art. Many employees of cultural institutions, whose work makes exhibitions and artistic projects possible, go unnoticed and unrecognized, and they are literally left in the shadows." It was the shadows of the guests that became the basis for this series of watercolors, in which the "absence" of the model is just as important as the image itself. Over time, the series expanded, and not only cultural figures were able to become its subjects. However, the main method of creating the works, which involved interviews and "shadow portraits," remained unchanged. The people whose shadows became the basis for the subsequent works answered the same question posed by Muromtseva: "When did you first feel that you were living inside a story?" Their answers became part of the works, and the series itself became an archive of personal testimonies about time, memory, and the experience of historical events.

Ekaterina Muromtseva was born in 1990 in Moscow, currently lives and works in New York. She graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy of Moscow State University (2012), the Moscow School of Photography and Multimedia. Rodchenko (2017) and the Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts (2022). The artist's solo exhibitions have been held at the XL Gallery ("Time Difference", 2021; "Hard Male Portrait", 2019; "Quarter to Twelve", 2018; "More Than Us", 2017), the Plato Gallery in New York ("Here Looking At You", 2025), the Moscow Museum of Modern Art ("What Happens to Others", 2019), the M HKA Museum in Antwerp, Belgium (2021), and others.