“My home is always with me” 2022
I once saw a large Ukrainian flag in a store and wanted to buy it to wear around the city. It was too expensive for me, so I decided to sew my own from pieces of fabric. What began as a simple gesture gradually turned into an endless performance — a continuous movement from place to place, and a constant attempt to settle. For me, this has become a routine I’ve lived with for eight years. Now it has become part of the lives of many others who were forced to leave their homes, without ever choosing this path.
I remember how hard it was for my mother to leave Luhansk — to walk away from everything she had built her life around. For the first year, she waited for the war to end, believing that everything would return to how it once was. Then, slowly, she adapted to a new place… and now the story repeats again.
For me, it is easier to endure. But it is still painful to witness how many people have lost everything they had. And I feel deeply grateful for all the help I see around me — for the many people across the world who are willing to support Ukraine.
This, to me, is the most powerful force of love: the sense of unity that makes us all victorious over inhumanity. Photos by Olesia Saienko
“Digital Harvest” 2021
The video observes a process of digital harvesting, rendered in intentionally low fidelity to mirror the gap between the digital realm and lived, four-dimensional reality. This reduction in quality heightens the sense of estrangement from nature and introduces a subtle dissonance: a person, still inherently part of the world, attempts to withdraw from it by constructing a new reality. Yet this transition remains incomplete. The human self is inevitably tethered to its physical form, preventing full escape.
Thus, the digital harvest becomes only a projection of the real—capable of feeding intellectual longing, but forever unable to satisfy physical hunger.
“The war is still not over” 2022
with Aglaya Nogina
In this work, the artist was thinking about the rapid disappearance of information. She cyclically continued to write the words “The war is still not over” with water on roads and public squares, thereby reminding us of the terrible realities of Ukrainian life. While writing down the words, the previous ones lost their shape and visibility. Later, it was even impossible due to the evaporation of water. So, it was challenging to recognise the meaning, just as it is challenging to feel the courage and the pain of people who are going through the war.
The unconscious source of the idea became the Chinese method of writing hieroglyphs with water. While the masters were writing, the beginning of the hieroglyph disappeared, and this meant the infinity of being.