“Private tour of an exhibition that cannot be visited”, 2024
15’ audio
This tour emerged as an intersection of time and realities, a way to share the inaccessible, a desire to draw closer to what is lost. After it was recorded, I learned that this exhibition in our family apartment in Luhansk no longer exists—the apartment was seized by the military. All the works that were displayed there, I brought in 2017 as an act of trying to preserve a connection with an already occupied city. These are works by friends who have never been to my city and may never visit. Yet, some of them occasionally dream that we walk there together.
“Once a year and a stick shoot”
300 × 250 cm
wooden sticks, 2023
for exhibition HOW ARE YOU? (Krakow, Poland) curated by Natalia Wiernik
In this work, I refer to a shared human experience that remains legible even in an unarticulated form. I believe these deep-seated images exist somewhere between rationalization and the persistent ways perception and meaning are transmitted. Phenomena and events of the past cast a shadow onto the future, and this shadow grows alongside us.
“The waiting area is currently occupied”, 2025
for exhibition MOSTLY MINED OUT in rotor gallery (Graz,Austria) curated by Nastia Khlestova and Maksym Khodak
In the installation, I turn to my own memories of my hometown, which was occupied more than ten years ago. Over this time, the experience that connected me to Luhansk has shifted and dissolved, transforming into a space of imagination and fantasy. Clinging to any fleeting possibility of preserving this connection, I find myself confronting the unknown. The city moves beyond my grasp, and all that remains is to create situations that serve as a substitute for real interaction, drawing from my knowledge and desires. In this imagined space of the unknown, anything can potentially happen. I look as if from the outside at our apartment, which was taken by Russian soldiers, trying to recognize it. I see my grandmother, who chose to stay in the city and resents that we left. She watches a screen showing a video from the opening of an exhibition I held in the occupied city in 2017 when it was still possible to go there. She doesn’t understand what she is looking at in the video; she gazes past it, into her own imagined world, where everything is as she wishes it to be. I look there too, but I see something different—because in the space of the unknown, anything can happen.
“A glimpse into the possible past”
photos, print 2024
for exhibition Nobody. Nowhere. Never. God willing! in DCCC (Dnipro, Ukraine) curated by Natasha Chychasova, Anastasiia Leliuk
The exhibition of young Ukrainian artists, which I organized in my room in occupied Luhansk in 2017, has undergone changes over time. The only person who looked after our apartment—my grandmother—changed and added new elements to the exhibition according to her taste, which I tried to recreate in the installation.
“Searching for a safe place”
180 × 83 paper, print 2022
— Where is the safest place?
— I think it doesn’t exist, because even my own body is never a safe place, and it doesn’t truly belong to me.
“They Saw the Old Lighthouse”
60 × 80 cm
sea shells, sand, textile 2024
This spontaneous intervention in the space of a newly built shopping center in Ukrainka is an attempt to find a language for speaking about the temporarily occupied island of Dzharylhach. In the summer of 2021, the artist visited the island for the last time with friends. From that trip, she brought back various shells found along the shore near the old lighthouse.