Artist Statement

I work in a multidisciplinary field, combining painting, video, performance, collage, digital and found materials. I’m interested in the interaction between the subject and the environment, in co-authorship with non-human agents, in the visual language of symbols and everyday signs, in the poetics of absurdity, estrangement, and documentation as a form of expression. My practice merges grotesque, humor, observation, and philosophical reflection.

Painting holds a central place in my work. I approach it as a form of embodied thinking — a medium for material reflection and sensory notation of ecological relationships. In the project Letters to the Island, based on a long-term performative dialogue with an island in Chelyabinsk, the paintings became responses to the presence of living beings, natural processes, and traces of human activity. I perceive the island as an active co-author: I observe its “responses” in the form of marks, light, and sounds, and create works at the intersection of landscape diary, fiction, and ritual. The island also “ran” an Instagram account, from which I received “messages” that became part of the artistic exchange — blending imagination and observation.

Currently, I am developing the painting series Man and Space, focused on the experience of environments — especially architecture as space, and the body within it — through perception, imagery, texture, and gesture.

Collage is another important medium in my practice. I work with both digital and analog collages, combining personal archives, traces of performances, fragments of found images, and screen cultures. Collage becomes a way to stitch together heterogeneous realities and to document interactions with landscape, corporeality, and time. In Letters to the Island, collage served as a way to materialize the relationship with the island as an agent both real and mythological.

In the project Lunation, I create objects and painterly assemblages that incorporate human hair, inscriptions, and the ruble symbol, exploring the boundaries of the bodily, the economic, and the ritual — blending absurdity and vulnerability.

Through video and performance — such as Remote Work and Purification — I explore the cultural and social conditions of contemporary life, often using irony and absurdity to highlight specific tensions and phenomena.

Occasionally, I also work as a curator for group exhibitions, focusing on themes of environment, materiality, and posthumanist practices. In the curated exhibition Closer to Water, I brought together works by artists exploring water as a living medium — a boundary and a mediator between the human and the non-human. The project became a space for contact between artistic gestures, natural elements, and transitional states.