Artist statement
My artistic practice emerges from the condition of forced migration. In 2022, at the age of 37, I left Russia. This radical shift in circumstances, roles, and social context precipitated the disintegration of my former identity.
Within my practice, I investigate the phenomenon of nomadic identity as it manifests in the contemporary subject: a mobile and unstable configuration of selfhood in which the subject is no longer anchored to a singular social role, cultural belonging, or spatial framework. Nomadic identity unfolds not only as an individual condition but as a collective one, shaped by war, forced displacement, and systemic global instability. Amid accelerated technological transformation and the total saturation of media, identity ceases to function as a fixed or stable structure.
My research is centered on liminal states: transition, shifts in status, rebirth, transformation, suspension, anticipation. This inquiry materializes through the construction of transitional spaces associated with airlocks, vestibules, elevators and thresholds. Thus the Black Box project (2025) takes the form of an opaque black parallelepiped punctured with openings for the hands. The viewer cannot see its interior and receives no instructions beyond the possibility of engagement: to insert one’s hands or to withdraw. The decision remains unresolved, held in potential.
I also turn to ritual, cyclicality, and repetition as modes of temporary stabilization and reflection within conditions of ongoing instability. I construct accumulative fields of repetitive elements that operate spatially as a meditative structure. Visual, sonic, and tactile repetition modulates temporal perception, synchronizing the viewer with the present moment - akin to prayer, breath, heartbeat, or dance. These elements coalesce into installations that acquire their own internal dynamics — moving, sounding, transforming. In Module of the Possible (2025), approximately 1,500 hand-formed ceramic elements hover in suspended interaction.
Anthropomorphic forms such as heads, bodily fragments, busts — recur throughout my work as conventional vessels of identity. They function as familiar containers of subjectivity. In the project The Chamber of Secret (2024), composed of anthropomorphic sculptures that progressively lose structural stability, these forms figure identity as something that has exhausted its relevance — shed like the sloughed skin of a reptile.
My primary media include installation, sculpture, photo, and video. I work with ceramics, unfired clay, textiles (threads, ropes, nets), metal, and both natural and synthetic materials. Material selection is guided by its expressive capacity and its ability to mediate a complex experiential register: visual, tactile, sonic, affective. Ceramics occupy a central position, enabling an engagement with form, surface, resonance, and spatial articulation. In turning to unfired clay as a material of temporality and disintegration, I foreground the vulnerability of form. In the video work What am I? (2024), a clay sculpture dissolves in water over the course of 42 minutes, gradually relinquishing its human contours and dispersing into a cloudy suspension.
Through this practice, liminality shifts from a theoretical construct into an embodied, affective, and durational experience. Rather than stabilizing identity into a new coherent form, my work sustains it as a process — contingent, permeable, and perpetually in formation.