Artist Statement

I was born in a small industrial town that is slowly sinking underground due to collapsing mines. The places of my childhood are abandoned, my school has cracked, and my friends left long ago. I don’t have a sense of home — or rather, I experience it only through its absence, as a nostalgia for something lost.

I work with personal archives, trying to reshuffle the past like a deck of cards and reclaim my childhood experience. I photograph teenagers who remain in the town. I capture the decaying spaces and the people trying to carve out a future amid the ruins.

I’m drawn to how people inhabit post-Soviet landscapes, full of emptiness and abandonment. I explore how layers of past and present collide through it’s contrast. My focus lies in how impersonal territories such as train stations, parking lots, underpasses become a part of everyday life. How people adapt to new conditions of urbanization that offers not just comfort, but also isolation.

Themes of social alienation, the loss of intimacy, and the transformation of love in the age of technology are central to my practice. I approach them through the lens of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. I collect my used tissues after therapy sessions and turn them into installations. That is how I’m giving a shape to traumatic experiences and intense emotions. The sterility of photography, the white background and the flash, becomes my lab for studying feeling and human connection.

Currently, I continue to explore the theme of lost home, loneliness in the new realities of emigration, the fragile threads that still tie me to my past and the effort to preserve flickering connections with friends. I try to establish a dialogue with local residents by photographing their psychological portraits and studying the local language and traditions.