body returning attempts, 2024
A series of watercoloroil paintings depicting the attempts of the dead to return to their bodies by connecting with a tree. People who have been violently killed, deprived of their lives and bodies on battlefields, near their homes, try to connect with a tree to regain their subjectivity.
Diary, 2023
Self-made diary, digitally printed photos, bunk bed
The work is inspired by the book “The Hunger Angel” by the German-Romanian writer Gerta Müller.
The book describes the everyday life of a Romanian German in a labor camp in the Donetsk region after World War II.
This work is about human grief. About the similarity of experiencing a disaster for different people at different times. About its closeness and repeatability.
The diary is placed on a bunk bed. This bed is a universal symbol of a refugee camp, a labor camp, a concentration camp. A place of loss of home and freedom.
Untitled, 2022, analog photography, digital print
This photo project considers the horrors of Russian war crimes .
It explores the torture as the main method of the Russian army. Torture and rape as a tool of power. Its relevance became obvious after the wide publication of photos from the freed town of Bucha. Aestheticized and sexualized pictures instigate the viewer to look at the image through the eyes of the executioner.
Our Family, 2023
The photo album includes photos taken by me from the moment of the full-scale invasion 24.01.22 until spring 2023. More than a year of life during the war.
The photos depict people and events that surrounded me during this time. Mainly the life of the art community. This is a documentation of war life for the future. But also a way to show normalization, adaptation to war and continuation of “life” against the background of total disaster. The photos are in a red album from the times of the Soviet Union with the inscription “Our family”.
Sleep peacefully, it won’t happen again, 2023, paper, watercolor
Various tombstones from the Lukyanivska military cemetery are depicted on 10 papers.
Tombstones with inscriptions on military mass graves of the Second World War.
Tombstones with inscriptions on military graves of the russian-Ukrainian War 2014.
A series about the relativity of the concept of peace, the repetition of wars, human deaths and suffering in its honor. Relativity of memory and obviousness of forgetting.
we accepted death, 2022, analog photography
I think a lot about the future after the war. About the mutilated bodies of people, the absence of limbs, mental injuries. This is the new norm for our reality. I pass these thoughts through the prism of my own personality/my own body, imagining myself crippled by a missile attack. Would I be able to accept it and live on? Will we be able to accept the consequences of war and live on?
Statement
My art is mainly about the fear of loss and an attempt to preserve what has not yet been lost. And if it is lost, I aim to rethink and materialize this loss. In my younger years, I experienced the death of my close friends, and in many ways, it shaped me as an artist.
War is synonymous with loss. I have been lucky not to yet lose my home, my city, my memories. But the short-lasting experience of fleeing my hometown and the fear of not returning have only strengthened the need to record what can be so easily erased1. For now, I have this opportunity.
I work a lot with photography. I do not use it as a tool for constructing images but as a means of testimony. Photography can be synonymous with text.
A significant part of my practice is dedicated to the topic of corporeality. I have worked extensively with male eroticism. This practice borders between the manifestation of love and the search for beauty, and it is an attempt at inner emancipation aimed at changing the gender roles of both artist and model2.
I turn to self-portraits3 as evidence of my material presence. I imagine most of my works as a story happening after my death, serving as proof of my existence, my friends, and my surroundings. It is a simultaneous escapism into the past and the future, where grief is still or no longer present.
The album My Family4 is a documentation of the first year of the war. It represents the life of the artistic community and the normalization of life during the war. Evacuation, living in another city, hiding from shelling, parties, and exhibitions. Hervé Guibert wrote that photography has any value only if it captures a certain time and space. This is a statement that accurately describes this work.
After the Russian invasion, I started looking for kinships with other wars5, for points of intersection between past memories and present events, especially in my hometown. I think about a world that has never had peace and tranquility. About endless war and suffering. These thoughts are embodied in the work Sleep Well, It Won’t Happen Again6. The collision of the grief from different wars in one particular place. The hope for a peaceful future that ends a few meters away. Deaths in the name of the Motherland. Deaths that will never end.
I reflect a lot on the human body, which during the war is the main target of destruction, the target of terror. War on many levels is synonymous with the torture of the body. I started working with this topic in a kind of state of affect that emerged when the aftermath of the Russian occupation of Bucha was made public. In the project “Untitled”7, I depicted bodies that were tortured.
Thoughts about loss and life after loss are embodied in the work We Accepted Death8. In it, I express my fear of existence after losing a body part. In the graphic series Sewn People9 I try to reassemble bodies and bring them back to a conventional norm.
In places of mass murder and violent death, will the deceased be able to regain their bodies and personalities in the form of a tree-body? With these thoughts, I created the work People Who Became Trees10.
The full-scale Russian-Ukrainian war has been going on for two years now, and it’s hard to think of it as something separate — as something that never happened and will end someday. In the present and future, I see more responsibilities than opportunities. To continue my work, to document what surrounds me, to create culture in times of its total destruction.
The text is written in cooperation with Alya Segal (2024).
Artist’s Bio
Born in 1997 in Kyiv, Ukraine. Based in Kyiv, Ukraine. Multidisciplinary artist. The main themes with which the artist works are corporeality, death, sexuality and memory. From 2012 to 2016 studied graphic design at Colledge of Kiyv National University of Technology and Design. In 2018, she graduated from the Kiyv National University of Technology and Design with a bachelor’s degree in graphic design. Studied in Kiyv Academy of Media Arts in the specialty of modern art.