My work is forged in the transition between two eras: Soviet and post-Soviet. Growing up on the periphery of Russia, I witnessed the birth of a new socio-political system, an experience that shaped my critical lens. In my projects, I examine the myths that form society, wade through the difficult legacy of state regimes, and reveal the mechanisms of social memory. 

The basis of my art is the analysis of environment and language. To do this, I combine various media—photography, graphics, video, textiles, and natural materials—often reducing the human figure to a symbolic image. This depersonalization is a conscious technique, used to show the unity of destinies and the universality of experience. But I do not seek to erase the personal. Our individuality leaves traces: scars, gaps. Touch leaves evidence. A landscape is the evidence of the touch of many people. 

I explore these traces. I see how states erase people, how time erases us all. I accept that our memory may be completely erased. What remains is dust, ashes—carbon. A carbon footprint. Something is always doomed to eternal oblivion. I am interested in this oblivion as a duration: the act of disappearance and our resistance to it. These practices of resistance form our society and identity. The focus of my art is, therefore, the ontology of absence: the non-places, transit zones, abandoned spaces, and shadows of former places. I am drawn to these borderline cultural spaces, these layers of memory that reveal the world in all its contradictions. 

Engaged in an archaeology of the present, I make visible the ghosts of the past that hang over us. I reveal the traces of an individual’s collision with hierarchical systems, such as imperialism, and the social consequences of global mega-projects. I am interested in the individual price of the common good. 

Space is my central object of attention, for the idea of vastness is decisive to our identity. In the “endless movement across vast expanses, ” a significant part of the country is transformed into a giant transit zone; the difficult journey from west to east becomes the main metaphor for a special path; and the search for “free lands” is embodied in a dystopia. I explore the aesthetic experience of infinity of space by humans.