I work with visual art in the form of experimental graphics, drawings, installations, where the center is a person in interaction with the material world. In my practice, I turn to the phenomenology of individual and collective memory, trauma caused by autobiographical motifs. I create objects that appeal to the root of everyone's identity, to the temporal space that remains outside of conscious memory. The practices of co-creation have a special place in my work, where shared knowledge fills the gaps in personal history, and personal knowledge can shed light on collective experience.
I create a space for implementation of a dialogue of details, elements of visual everyday life: sources of basic symbols that accompany a person throughout life and become key in the process of self-identification. I try to be attentive to the routine: the surfaces on which the eye slides without focusing, the things we carelessly touch. This material background, in which consciousness wanders, gives it form.
This search is not necessarily aimed at a result, rather at acquiring the skill of conscious living. My family carries the trauma of the Holodomor, resettlement within the framework of the Vistula operation, great losses during the Second World War, forced labor in camps, repressions. I was formed in a space where there was a lack of a safe place to experience and discuss the past. Much of the information about the roots has been lost. I complete the immeasurable experience of my relatives through other stories in artistic images thanks to participatory practices. In my works, I try to create a safe space for living through a potentially traumatic experience. I often turn to tactile memory, to the properties of the body to remember.
In the beginning, my work was about silencing, unspoken losses of the past. At that time, I still kept a certain distance. I was engaged in forming a connection with the earth, jointly creating a new level of responsibility for the space in which a person finds himself and lives now. I was also focused on rebuilding the connection with material culture, which was systematically destroyed, in particular, as a result of violent, forced relocations that the previous generations suffered from. Before 2022, I worked on processing the traumatic events of the war unleashed by Russia, perception of a new, changed reality, the lack of a sense of security. The birth of a child increased the sensitivity to security as a deficit need, as a prerequisite for certain behavior. Since then, I have been very present in my works.
Now, for me, the problem of the lack of language, its lack for presentation of our experience, ethical and aesthetic reasons to speak about it is relevant. Internal censorship as the acquired experience of generations is the place from which I started. The ability to name experiences helped society to realize itself as a single organism. Every loss, every destroyed home hurts. I watch how we learn to experience phantom pains together, as a collective body, and not alone, within our own, so tiny and fragile. A person is not capable of being the only container of his history.