My artistic practice is rooted in the experience of witnessing the dissolution of the late Soviet Union – a historical rupture that left profound psychological and cultural imprints. This personal and collective sense of displacement forms the core of my research.
I engage with the legacy of Russian Constructivism, deconstructing its utopian ideals through the lens of memory. Drawing from the geometric rigor of its pioneers, I employ stark formal contrasts – sharp angles, monochromatic planes, and the symbolic tension of black, white, and red – to examine how revolutionary aesthetics become entangled with collapse. The movement’s once utopian forms, meant to architect a new society, are repurposed in my work to map dissolution: the slippage between ideology and its aftermath, between collective dreams and their unraveling.
I investigate the relationship between past time and present perception, focusing on transformed everyday and architectural objects that once served as iconic symbols of a specific ideology and now persist as relics of a bygone world. These objects act as surfaces for the projection of ambivalent feelings – nostalgia, melancholy, loss, irritation – resisting a singular reading. I am interested in how the past continues to live within us and in what ways it returns, particularly through aesthetic and architectural vestiges that shape collective memory and taste in the post-Soviet space.
Formally, I often work with repetitive patterns and structures, where repetition becomes a sign of memory, repression, and cyclical return. Inspired by the immersive logic of "Total Installations," my paintings, graphic works, and installations aim for an atmospheric density. They explore how individual recollection and collective history intertwine and condition one another, using a distilled Constructivist-Brutalist vocabulary – repetition, fragmentation, shifts in scale – to evoke the uncanny persistence of historical forms.
My practice asks: How do aesthetic systems outlive their ideologies? What traces linger in their angles and voids? I layer formal precision with traces of erasure, leaving the viewer suspended between the weight of history and the instability of its telling.