2023 - In Utero
"Salvation is a long road that leads through many gates." - Carl Gustav Jung
Most of us are afraid of darkness in some way or form. Yet we forget that it all starts from there. We all began in a dark, warm, and safe place and this is where we sometimes want or feel the need to get back to. Wouldn’t it be relieving and luring to get away from all the dangers and worries, from all the challenges of the outside world back to where it all began? But wouldn’t it mean that we’ll deny ourselves all the joys and pleasures of life?
The viewer is free to interpret the Utero as a safe space, the dark side of the soul, a place for new beginnings, or the transformation point. It’s all in one and each of its forms is inevitable.
2023 - Kids in the Pool
Light, sparkles, fascination with what's in front of you in this very moment, and new hopes for the future. When something strikes you as interesting or beautiful, first live the experience. Like a child does. Without questions. Only then make attempts to understand and come up with "whys".
The project was created "on the fly" when the artist, using her daughters as models, almost illegally got into a public pool in one of the major cities in Europe to capture the precious moments when we live our life fully experiencing a blend of joy, fear, amazement, curiosity, and rapture, all at the same time. Wouldn't life be more fun if we treated it as a pool welcoming us to play in it?
2023 - Pull
Brief speculation on the relationship of a human being with the word and society. It can be comforting, it can be suffocating. It's inevitable in any case.
Solo Works
All the works in this collection do not belong to any project, though might have been shot simultaneously with a certain project and feature the same locations or people
2023 - Multiverse
“The best things happen by chance. Spontaneity and improvisation, and intuition are three of the most important tools in any artist’s studio. And the fourth most important tool is trust. You have to trust what you’re doing. I had trust that this was gonna work — and I was right.” - Larry Bell.
Using and transforming Larry Bell's "Bill and Coo at MOCA’s Nest" this project is inspired and built around the ideas of the multiverse, the infinity of multitude, but most importantly the phenomena and notion of entropy, the fact that everything in the universe is heading towards chaos. This is of course a very frightening idea to the human brain, which is wired to try and create some order out of the messy world around us. There’s a constant opposition between the entropy of life and the human brain’s desire to find structured patterns to survive. We want to create order from the constant chaos in which we live, yet it’s impossible by definition and the essence of things. There wouldn't be life if there were no entropy. Still, we choose to chase the illusion of this possibility. Why? Maybe this is also “by design”, and we do it because our endless attempts are just contributing to the universal entropy of everything without us realizing it.
2023 - Illumination
You’ve been living in this home for my entire life. You seemed to know every single bit of it. Nothing was new, it’s all so familiar. Little did you know that there are basements, attics, rooms and whole gardens there that you simply passed by never suspecting they existed. Now it’s time to illuminate them and bring the light in.
2023 - Mind Games
There’s an event in your life (or an absence of an event). The event is experienced by you through a filter. You interpret it according to your beliefs, thought patterns, social background, and personal life troubles and joys. Your mind creates an image of the event for you. This image causes an emotion inside. The emotion then triggers some kind of reaction. You do something in response to the event. And it’s an eternal chain of consequences, the eternal pyramid of mind constructs.
What if the chain is broken? Then there’s a chance for a new beginning. When the mind thinks it knows, it creates a story. When it doesn’t know it gets confused. There’s no story to tell. And for a brief moment, there’s a possibility to see the truth independent of the mind.
2023 -Maze
A labyrinth or a maze is one of the oldest symbols of humanity, dating back to 2500BC. It’s also a motif found across many cultures and continents. A complex man-built structure, resembling both a map of a spiritual dance and the biological structures of the human brain is intriguing and at the same time frightening. In some traditions mazes, shapes as circles represent a meandering but purposeful journey: a journey or path to our own center and back again out into the world. Passing through a maze is always difficult, but if in the end you find what you were looking for, even it’s just a way out is rewarding, as any hero’s journey. One person enters the maze and different one comes out of it, even though the face is the same.
The project is fed and informed by the ideas of Carl’s Jung’s collective unconscious and individualisation and Joseph Campbell’s lectures on ancient myths and how they influence our perceptions of the world today. Circles and spheres represent both wholeness, connection and heavy weight of inner contemplations.
2023 - Red on White
Life is raw as all forces of nature and often we suffer from expecting it to be something which it is not. In our minds we create all sorts of rules that life is supposed to follow, construct meanings and strive for some obscure perfection. Life however is an experience, not a thought or idea.
The Red in the pieces is the life itself, between the black and white, it’s both angry and loving, cozy warm and burning hot, it’s the birth and death. The white is the field and the scene where life occurs.
Inspired by the art and practice of Asian calligraphy this project accumulates the artist’s play and study of the state of no-mind or Mushin. Practiced by Zen and Buddhist monks as well as calligraphers and martial artists. This state is referred to as shape without form, direction without direction, action from inaction. Mushin is achieved when a person's mind is free from thoughts and concepts. There is an absence of discursive thought and judgment, so the person is totally free to act and react without hesitation and without disturbance from any thoughts. In state of no-mind you rely only on instinct and intuition. Your actions become raw and unadorned, natural and pure.
This state is never lasting however. We do return to our minds, thinking and building concepts. The pieces included in the project are a product of the free flow of the artist’s intuition. The captions and this abstract is the attempts of the artist’s mind to reason with it and explain why and what the intuition was referring to.
2023 - Moonland
It’s quiet. It’s still. It’s puzzling and confusing. But it wants to speak to you. Wants you to discover a new direction and ultimately change. “Change for the better?” you would ask. “Not exactly” will be the answer. Aren’t you tired of the concepts of “good” and “bad”, “right” and “wrong”? All the fun is in the exploration of where change might lead you. Find your way in the flow.
The project revolves around the symbolism of a moon, as seen by humans. The Moon is a symbol for human emotions in many Asian cultures, it’s also a symbol of quietness and stillness of the night, a guiding light in the darkness. It’s a symbol of contemplation and change at the same time, because we see it’s shape ever changing. The Moon is small compared to the Earth and the Sun and still its influence on the life of our planet is significant: it forces waters to shift creating high and low tides. The Mood in some sense also represents weakness and femininity. It’s an open door of all of those meanings, and each person who enters it will get to a different place. The number of those places is infinite and this is the beauty of this symbol.
2023 - No.Thing
It’s interesting how in a world where we have so many things we often want to see less. To focus, to reflect, to breathe. In the eternal chase for the next thing and the next it comes to a point when everything has to stop. Peace comes when there is nothing. Nothing to worry about, nothing to chase, nothing to possesse. It’s not forever though. Something will be born from emptiness. Inevitably.
2023 - Outer Space Around the Corner
Space-time and Quantum Mechanics are the pillars of our modern understanding of fundamental physics. However, there're recent studies by The Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and other scholars that suggest that this understanding of fundamentals is doomed and more than limited. If there's actually something beyond space and time, we might be able to travel in the universe without limits. Outer space is near, it has always been there, you just need to take a different look at the world around you and you'll move faster than the speed of light.
2023 - Geometries of Thought
Our brains have evolved to see patterns and work with symbols to save energy and be able to quickly spot danger or food. We see a glimpse of a shape and we immediately associate it with something familiar, constructing a story about it: "That rectangle is a building and I'm not going there". The process is usually fast and unconscious. We rarely second-guess simple everyday life things that we see around us when being focused on something more important. The moment we do start to notice strange and interesting alignments in the geometries around us is exciting. In reality, nothing changes, it's the same rectangle. What's changed is our point of view and therefore our feeling about it. We can now construct a new story, consciously this time, and see familiar things in a new light. The project offers a few unusual perspectives for a mind to play with and make new connections.
2022 -23- We Homes
Neuroanthropologist John S. Allen says that humans are “fundamentally home-minded.” Home isn’t just a physical place, it is also a cognitive one shaped by our biology and our culture. “You can’t buy a home,” Allen explains. Rather, a home is something “that you have to build yourself”, so that you have a space that shelters us from the outside world and, through its comfortable familiarity, calms our senses so that we may rest and face the next day’s challenges.
Besides a physical space, people also inhabit their inner homes. Everyone of us is a home to dreams, thoughts, memories, impressions, beliefs, ways of living and being, ways of carrying ourselves in this world. Those homes are not always peaceful and cozy however. When building an external home, isn’t it better to start with the one you have inside carefully choosing the look, feel of your inner space? Then perhaps even you are far away from your physical home, you won’t feel so homesick and lonely.
2022 - Stretch
It all begins with bits and tiny moves, but as you keep with it, you'll begin being able to touch new boundaries, the ones that seemed far beyond your reach before.
How far can we stretch our minds to fit in all the impossibilities of the world? This kind of exploration is good enough for making a life worth living.
2022 - Secret Garden
She felt strangely more tranquil than ever when she knew she was no longer in the house. The sunshine made the whole place look different. The high, deep, blue sky arched over her, and she kept lifting her face and looking up into it, trying to imagine what it would be like to lie down on one of the little snow-white clouds and float about. It was her very own secret and sacred place. Only for her, no one else.
2022 - New Experience
When you try something new your experience seems to last longer, even though it went by in a blink of an eye in reality. This project is about being present for this new experience and actually living it, taking it in, sucking it in no matter what. Even if it’s uncomfortable, awkward, strange, unsettling and even painful.
Wait and see how you’ll be so accustomed and bored with this experience that once seemed so unusual and will run or be pushed to another new thing in no time at all. So relax and enjoy. No matter what. Hatching from an egg is incredibly hard for a newborn chick, yet it's crucial for its further survival and strength.
2022 - Foam
All the hopes and dreams, all your achievements and heroic deeds will eventually melt away one bubble at a time. But how blissful, joyous, light, and pleasant are the fractions of moments when you seem to catch them and hold them in your hand like something real and tangible!
The series is a collection of fantasies inspired by the lightness and transience of life events.
2022 - Blues
Inspired by the bright northern sun which never leaves the skies from April to September. White nordic days and nights are magical. They bring peace, new ideas, but most importantly new hopes for the future as bright as it can be.