Statement

I am attracted to contradictions. They create tensions charged with creation and destruction. Discrepancy is part of my life experience, but it is also at the core of human nature – inconsistent and at times self-destructive. Most people live experiencing or expecting a catastrophe that range from inequity and environmental issues to war. They are continuously subjected to the trauma associated with it and project it back to the external world as violence. As ambitious as it may sound, my artistic research aims to find a cure to the imperfection of human nature and thus access my own peace of mind.

My interdisciplinary practice weaves together space, situation, and memories. I merge imaginary realities of the human mind, constructed realities of technology, and concrete realities of nature. The result is formally minimal yet surreal, detached yet emotional, domestic yet industrial. The content of my work unfolds through the viewer’s response to it. This slow discovery mimics the world where things are not what they seem.

I use materials that have a fetishistic charge. Fetish is a sign that something is amiss. People tend to rely on fetish as a compensation mechanism for what is broken or absent in life, yet we seldom admit our dependency on it. By integrating fetish objects and materials in my work, I create intimate encounters where comfort and exposure, seduction and repulsion, joy and embarrassment coexist in a viewer’s experience. These situations create a shortcut to the subconscious – to the instincts we try to suppress.

Scars do not dissolve over time. I look deeper into the motivation behind our actions and choices, reaching back to childhood, a period of life when we are most vulnerable to distress, to search for the origin of the internal conflict. By re-creating traumatizing experiences through games, I search for relief of their burden.

For ages, philosophers and sci-fiction novelists have considered scenarios for a perfect society. However, every utopia, sooner or later, finds its dystopian counterpart. I was born and raised in the USSR, a utopian experiment that eventually turned into a nightmare. Because of my deep emotional connection with that time, I borrow the utopian aesthetic based on order, rationality, and reason. Yet, being a witness to the fall of the “perfect society,” I understand that reason is just another form of nonsense. People are neither rational, nor logical. The fragile universal order that utopias are stretching for keeps falling apart under the onslaught of the chaotic reality.

More often than ever, we outsource our problems, hoping that technology can help us create a new age, a new us. The first idea that came to fruition, however, was to delegate killing to the unmanned machines. By programming technology with human hate, we are nurturing a potentially competing force that may eventually surpass its creators in intelligence and power. While looking at historical utopian ideas, I want to imagine future scenarios for the nature-human-technology triad that do not use hate as the common denominator.