My photographs are a direct product of my daily experiences,
a way by which I examine different aspects of representing subjective reality
in which contrasts co-exist, things that can feel close but
distant at the same time, or intimate by yet foreign. In a way, my photographs
deal with deconstruction, with the disappearing, central to which is the
perception of the self. I am preoccupied with questions of the individual, the
whole person. Where does identity come from? To what extent can it be controlled?
My early childhood was characterised mainly by the tension between an identification with a place and the need to adapt to a new culture and a new way of life. As a child I was with a developed sense of imagination and a high degree of sensitivity, all of which found expression through performance
art – a world full of possibilities that allowed me to channel my emotions into
one space. At 18 I was about to start Acting School, but my
parents’ strict Soviet upbringing meant they could not support Art as a
profession, and I was not brave enough to take that road on my own. And so,
for nearly a decade, I worked in a different jobs, trying to figure out what it was that
I wanted to do with my life. While full of confusion, this period would prove to
be one of the most significant in my life, starting with leaving my parents’
home at 18, moving from place to place, searching, asking questions.
Eventually, after several failed attempts to find my vocation, I realized that I
was missing something at my core and decided to return home.
Art allowed me to express the way I experience life, to lend a voice to what
was happening inside me. I sought a space where I could create a dialog
between feeling and thought. I photograph using a 35 millimeters camera, mostly spontaneously, in
response to mundane stimulation. The body of work is constructed afterwards,
delaminated from a series of images taken in different places and at different
times.