“Shadow Conversations”, 2020 - 2024, ongoing
In many of my projects I use documentary methods such as conducting interviews. Usually these interviews inspire particular works and act as a starting point, reflected in the artwork partially or obliquely. In the case of the drawing sessions I am fusing the documentary element and the creation of the piece itself. During the shadow portrait painting, I asked a person a question that I posed many times before: “When did you first feel that you live in history?” Their answers located their individual lives in a larger narrative. Each portrait session took thirty minutes to an hour, during which I painted a watercolor portrait of a visitor’s shadow.
“Shadow Conversations”, drawing sessions, interviews, performance, Pushkin House, London, UK, 2023
“How to Become Invisible”, 2020
A series of large-scale watercolors depicting the shadows of underpaid and underrepresented cultural workers. The cultural field is very vulnerable and precarious, with a lot of unpaid labor and exploitation for the sake of being close to art. A lot of institutional staff who contributed to the process of exhibitions organization are routinely not credited and remain in the shadows. I started a series depicting the cultural workers through collaborative painting sessions. Instead of drawing realistic portraits, I focused my attention on the shadows they cast on the walls. Besides drawing, I was interested in communication with participants too and interviewed them about their working conditions.
