The Exiles / 2024

Multi-exposure digital photography
Digital prints on transparent film

The Russian world collapsed. Artists, photographers, musicians, and writers scattered to different countries and cities. Just like a hundred years ago, after the bloody revolution in October 1917. Those who did not accept the war, censorship and dictatorship of the special services. Those who decided that freedom and honesty are more important, have left and do not want to return. It's excruciating, no matter how independent these Russians try to look. They have nowhere to go. Just yesterday, successful and confident, they travel the world in search of a home. They don't find anything. Foreign cities, foreign languages, foreign rules. They are foreign everywhere. The exiles.

This is Not Your Home / 2024

Digital photography
Digital prints

In this project I analyze the feelings of an expat through architecture and natural motifs. With the help of my photographs, I want to talk about the inner experiences of a person, cut off from their native people and places, about a difficult path and an ongoing encounter with longing for what was lost. This work encourages the viewer to think about the meaning of home, homeland, roots and identity. It confronts us with important questions about how external circumstances can influence our internal experiences, especially when it comes to emigration. When I left Russia, the border guard told me that this was no longer my home. These words seemed to cut the thread connecting me with my native land. Since then, I have forever lost that warm feeling that lived in me.

Connected Personalities / 2024

Knitting, weaving Threads, wire, acrylic

What unites people who have been forced to emigrate? Loss of internal identity, pressure from society, fears, conflicts with oneself, attempts to fit into new realities. The interaction of light and shadow in this work echoes Carl Gustav Jung's concept of the shadow "self," emphasizing internal conflict and suppressed aspects of identity that surface during emigration. These shadows – the unseen – are what unite most emigrants.

Russian Silent Longing / 2022-2023

Digital photography
Digital prints

The project ‘Russian Silent Longing’ is about deep disappointment without the slightest hope for healing. About pain, about powerlessness and silence, about fear and love, about life and death, about cycles. Russian longing as both the eternal and the temporary. Russia is my unhappy love. Culture beyond time and beyond space. The search for a new life. The search for a new form. We will continue to keep the light in us. We will carry it in our hearts through the dark times, despite our hearts sunk in tears and blood.

Where the Wind is Getting Stronger / 2023

Mixed media

Scanning the shore with my eyes in search of the right combinations. "There's an unusual strip here," a pocket pulls away. Finding solace in each peculiar swirl, and with each new fragment nearing, I move forward, with a gnawing need underneath it all to change everything. The roar of the surf. Salt settling. In my nose, in my eyes, on my fingers. And on my feet too. And thousands like me. Like us.

Spiral / 2023

Mixed media
Digital prints

Thing which I’ve only faced in books was war. It always seemed far away, impossible to happen again. It began in the morning and time froze from that day. Sense of belonging to this terror forced me run away and I left the country, but I kept falling in thoughts: “How could it possibly happen? Why peaceful life felt apart under greediness of power and anger?” Drowning in the news headlines I’ve experienced each death over and over again as my own. I stuck in the wheel of samsara, trying to find answers maybe not even exist. Events are cyclical, but for me it’s not a circle. History goes in a spiral, moving forward, allowing the same mistakes. Death is difficult to remained overlooked, but life takes its place all the time. Are we against or the part of it? And can we prevent war?

Stillness / 2024

Mixed media
Sculpture

Paper “skin”: short-lived, easily damaged, thin, like a cultural layer separating us from chaos and non-existence. But if it had any words on it, they have faded or been erased. The art object captures the moment of readiness to look carefully and listen. To oneself, or to something greater than you: ephemeral, delicate, but seemingly related to purely human nature. Perhaps in this white silence new feelings and strengths are born, which will allow us to look at each other someday and start a dialogue.

A visual poem / 2022

Digital photography
Digital prints

The photo series was taken during my stay in Russia, in the residential district of Saint Petersburg. Together with parallel text, the images form a story about the restructuring of social reality and its interpenetration into physical reality. We only see the part of the world that we have agreed to see, but the boundaries of perception are constantly shifting, bending in curious ways. The constant state of perceptual destabilization leads to a reality that endlessly changes shape, becoming indeterminate.
Propaganda, intertwined with conspiracy theories that sometimes turn out to be facts, creates a ghostly place, a limbo where the perception of reality is distorted beyond recognition.

From Home / 2022-2024

Mixed media
Sculpture

In this project, I relied on my memories of simple everyday things that surrounded me in Russia and what my everyday life consisted of. A nail in a window frame, the bottom of a plate, a child’s treasure chest, a father’s shaving brush, a teapot lid, a stool leg – all this is not something that can be packed into a suitcase weighing 23 kg. This project is my way of mourning my losses, which are insignificant in the grand scheme of things. By collecting objects that are duplicates of my old things, I gain access to the most tender parts of my personality, to those layers of memory and feelings that already seemed inaccessible and forgotten. And I invite these parts to create sculptures, bypassing the rational part of my personality, without criticizing or evaluating anything. So, through art practice I connect with that feeling of peace, calm and security that I once had.

Nostalgia for Illusions / 2022-2024

Digital photography
Digital prints

The railroad leads to a place that no longer exists. This road led to the village where I spent my childhood. Now this village is empty, everyone has left.
This place was an island of happiness in the midst of endless loneliness, emptiness and lack of love. In this place I observed people and nature, rode my bike mindlessly and aimlessly, collected a different item every week, such as:
1. medicines from a village dump to prepare a witch’s potion right on the bench near the house
2. lizards (they are fast and difficult to find)
3. bullets found in the same landfill (where did they come from?
It’s a mystery to me)
4. small frogs from the swamps, which we released in the bathroom in the yard to make our own personal pond
5. wild raspberry
6. bow and arrows
7. slingshots
8. Soviet postcards
9. audio cassettes

From year to year I made attempts to collect them. I used different types of traps with food. You set a trap, tie a string and hide some- where around the corner, waiting. Not a single tomtit was caught (I just wanted to look closer at the bird and let it go, like lizards and frogs). I’m still trying to learn to understand people, walking along this road all my life to a place that doesn’t exist.
Who is this person? What makes him happy? How do you cope with weakness? Where does one find strength? How does he laugh? Did he love? What does he dream about? I just wanted to take a closer look and let it go.
I feel nostalgia for unfulfilled happiness, unfulfilled events that seem to have not happened, but they did. They were in the lives of others, somewhere. Other people, other books, other music fed my thoughts, my imagination fed my memories. My real memories are just as fantastic as those lived through the eyes of another, others.
Is freedom from illusions necessary?
Illusions helped me maintain life in myself when I left a place that now no longer exists. I created my own worlds, in which there was a place for love and happiness, confidence, freedom and everything that my soul desires. And then I came to my grandmother on vacation, first of all I ran to the bicycle, I loved it so much, then I looked for lizards, raspberries, bullets and a lot of all sorts of rubbish.