Kanis’ practice involves performance and staged videos, in which she creates provocative social situations, connected to education, indoctrination, and the application of power. She has been nominated for the Innovation Award and the Kandinsky Prize, Russia’s two most prestigious art prizes.

Polina Kanis is creating a special project for Auditorium Moscow in which she will examine fitness and aerobics exercises in parks around Moscow today, a strange hybrid of totalitarian sports aesthetics, pop cultural new age readings, and the democratic Soviet ideal of harmonic physical development.