STANISLAVA OVCHINNIKOVA - Portfolio
stanislavaovchinnikova@gmail.com
+358449120943
upcoming:
2027 Solo exhibition at Asbestos Art Space, Helsinki (to see the confirmation click here)
2027 Solo exhibition at Garage 33 Gallery-Shelter, Kyiv (to see the letter of intent click here)
2027 Solo lecture-performance production at Mad House Helsinki (to see the letter of intent click here)
2026 / The Animal That Therefore You Made Me (Follow) / Performance, public space intervention / Helsinki, FI
This performance appropriated dogness as a politically motivated stance. Its starting place was a train arriving to the Central Railway Station of Helsinki, from which the performance proceeded through the railway station itself, and the surrounding territory. The total length of the path is ~1.2 kilometers, and duration of the performance is ~2 hours 15 minutes. The endpoint of the route was a refugee reception center run by Finnish Immigration Authority.
The performance was done as an independently made public space intervention, with no prior announcements made to the authorities or passersby. It was crucial to this work that it is not explained, nor introduced, nor mediated as an artwork; I wanted it to remain within the space of uncertainty and confusion for the viewer. Eero Yli-Vakkuri was documenting the performance and assisting me through deescalation (for example, by taking calls from the police and emergency services when they were contacted by concerned passersby.)
This performance is part of Bark! project, and was developed by me in conversation with a dog behaviorist Maria Batchenko and my dog Los’.
Full video documentation of the performance: https://vimeo.com/1204504201 (2 h 10 min). PASSWORD: preview
Images above: stills from performance documentation by Eero Yli-Vakkuri
2026 / A Performance for Two / Performance, installation / Amos Rex Museum, Helsinki, FI
A Performance for Two is a changing installation and a series of four performances. It was created for the 2026 triennial Generation exhibition of the Amos Rex Museum (Helsinki, Finland). The work takes shape around the installation (consisting of two chairs and a table) over the period of four months—the total duration of the exhibition. Each of the four performances is only done once, never repeating during the same exhibition. Every performance also brings changes the installation, which remains on view during the whole exhibition period. The four parts of the performance form a single narrative circle.
The starting point of this work is an episode from my family’s history: in the 1980’s USSR, while filling in a form to receive his first passport, my father was asked to provide a Ukrainian-language version of his surname—it had been pre-typed in Russian, while the Ukrainian equivalent was to be added by hand. Instead of adapting the surname in accordance with the Ukrainian orthographic rules, he simply transliterated it. Thus, ‘Ovchinnikov’ was recorded where ‘Ovchynnikov’ should have been. What if this mistake had caused a split in timelines, and there was born, in parallel reality, a version of myself that never had to carry the faulty surname? In A Performance for Two, I am inviting Stanislava Ovchynnikova into the museum space to work with me on rectifying this fault.
Performance idea & implementation, costume, production, installation/set design, writing: Stanislava Ovchinnikova
Technical assistance: Sohei Yasui, Marianne Lagus, Diego Nyberg
Backstage assistance: Julia Jaakkola
A Performance for Two, Part 1/4: durational performance (4h 15min)
Full video documentation of the performance: https://vimeo.com/1204853984 (4 h 15 min). PASSWORD: preview
photo by Mathias Rosenlund, 2026photo by Mathias Rosenlund, 2026photo by Mathias Rosenlund, 2026photo by Mathias Rosenlund, 2026video by Shubhangi Singh, 2026photo by Daniel Malpica, 2026
A Performance for Two, Part 2/4: text-based performance (10min)
Full video documentation of the performance: https://vimeo.com/1204548968 (10 min). PASSWORD: preview
Audio recording of the performance on 27/05/2026 at the Amos Rex Museum:
Excerpt from the text:
An animal entered first. They followed. And without undressing, without so much as taking off their shoes, their respirator, or their weathered gloves they darted to the westward wall and began rapping both their knuckles along the wood. The animal, which had kept at their heel at first, after a louder thump sidestepped and, having locked eyes with me, immediately lowered its haunches. A few more thumps, and they too stepped away, took off their respirator, and plunked it down.
Now, still against the wall, both of them were in perfect harmony. They, animal. Animal, they. Folds of skin upon folds of skin, wrinkled like toes inside a wet shoe, bold, fangless. Yes, fangless: when the animal opened its mouth you didn’t feel threatened at all, only somewhat perplexed—an animal with no fangs?
Everything had already come to the brink of collapse once before, right after they were born—for they were born alone. Utterly. It was bad luck, a premonition, to be born utterly alone into the world of twins, triplets, septuplets, alone into the world where everyone was another’s fake shemp, where everything had to have a copy, a duplicate to survive, where everything was repeating, reiterating, yes, the world where parents all looked like children, children like parents, and parents, at best, were facsimiles of each other.
Things had already been difficult since I had resorbed my twin. But the renewed desolation born from their gaze, how it drifted over our faces without resting, without pausing, without ever finding its mirror image, and worse—appearing never even to seek it, to be so empty it seemed not even to contain awareness of its own lack…
It was deemed best to bury them right away, to relieve everyone of the suffering. So we wrapped them in cloth and carried them outside. And it was there, suddenly, that all of it began—not even two steps out the door we were, when they began to scream, to cry, for the first time since birth! And all that surrounded us, everything in the garden seemed to respond—the wind rose and prowled among us, manes of the trees roared, creeks seethed, yes, they cried and the birds cried, they bellowed and the world itself seemed to bellow.
But now, here, they stood perfectly still against the westward wall. In harmony. They and the animal.
photo: Dana Neilson, 2026video: Dana Neilson, 2026
A Performance for Two, Part 3/4: sound-based performance (40min)
Full video documentation of the performance: https://vimeo.com/1204817451 (44 min). PASSWORD: preview
Audio recording of the performance from May 2026 is available here (Google Drive).
This performance is made using a 1/4” tape loop and a tape machine.
photo by Gonzalo Muruaga, 2026photo by Gonzalo Muruaga, 2026video by Mathias Rosenlund, 2026video by Mathias Rosenlund, 2026video by Gonzalo Muruaga, 2026photo by Gonzalo Muruaga, 2026photo by Maria Sennikova, 2026photo by Gonzalo Muruaga, 2026
A Performance for Two, Part 4/4: performance (40 min)
Full video documentation of the performance: https://vimeo.com/1220413918 (40 min). PASSWORD: preview
Video: excerpt from performance documentation, 2026Photo: Elsa Treviño, 2026Photo: Elsa Treviño, 2026
Video: excerpt from performance documentation, 2026Photo: Elsa Treviño, 2026Photo: Elsa Treviño, 2026Video: Elsa Treviño, 2026Video: excerpt from performance documentation, 2026
2026 / Untitled / Text / Artistic commission from Pori Art Museum, FI
Untitled is an artistic text exploring changes in consciousness and perception brought about by the experience of exile. It was commissioned by Pori Art Museum on the occasion of De Se - Attitude exhibition curated by Miina Hujala.
“Remember in order to repel,” my mother said, or maybe it was repair, but repel was what I wrote down, so when everything got that much worse and I left, packed everything I could carry and left, as I kept moving further and further away from home, one border after another, at the very early stages of this elongated leaving, this multinational coming and going, when the sight of what was had not yet begun to fade, right there and then, on the train or a bus or some other ride, I decided to dedicate myself fully to the practice of disciplining my imagination, having full belief in its potential for preservation, training myself not merely to summon with ease as well as surprising speed and vibrancy the images of the absolute worst, but also, and this was the essential part that everything else depended upon, to hold these images firmly and enduringly—for hours, sometimes weeks at a time—against the external present, all in order to repel, or more precisely in order to conjure and maintain a separation line between the remembered and the real, or, in even more precise terms, in order to keep the present of here away from the present of there, and as I am saying this, as I am stating this as clearly as possible at this difficult moment, I hope I make it easy for you to see that my motivation in the establishment of this practice was utterly selfless—I mean, it is only now, years later, that additional research has to be made, but not just mine—any individual’s memory will eventually fade, and let me assure you that even in such cases all I do is simply go online and search—the chemical weapons, open wounds, tranches dug with bare hands, the scorched fields, limbs separate and scattered, all consequences of things I would not wish upon anyone, clearly none of this is driven by any nostalgia or sentimentality, I do this only out of the need for information that, I must admit, many people across the world have found useful, for ever since the collapse began and I left, I started to receive invitations, see, people explicitly asked me to go and see places, and I really did travel—Berlin, Paris, Warsaw, and the smaller places too I never shied away from, preferred even—Noyers-sur-Sereine, Metzdorf, Wolfsburg, Frankfurt (Oder), Jyväskylä, Kristiinankaupunki, and each place I compared, each place before this one I measured up against that mental image and said not yet, not yet is the memory oozing, the line is firm, the inside and the outside are still separate, which was the honestly, truly the outcome I had hoped for—these months and years that I spent imagining sites of utter collapse and destruction were in no way bellied by any wish to encounter it in person, like I have said, I am neither nostalgic nor sentimental, to be honest I am just tired, that is what I am, this is a lot of work, holding up so much space in my head, and so when I started hearing all about your institutions, and, see, people really do talk, I cannot even hide why I am here, this is indeed because I had heard all about your institutions, I had been told about the perseverance, and the neutrality, and the tradition, and the rule of law, and I confess I wanted some of that for myself, I really did, I thought it could become my armament too, this is why I came here, yes, I thought that finally, in this place, here, in Pori, I could achieve the ultimate repulsion, meaning that I could finally solidify this line separating the inside from the outside, I would no longer have to guard it, that finally the imagined would release me and I would not have to see, I would not have to see it constantly with my mind’s eye, that under the guard of your institutions I could put down the image and stop comparing, I could stop living in two places simultaneously and simply inhabit one, the present one, yours, I was hoping for yours, and really I only wanted the light mind, this calm mental space, so yes I went to the police, I went to the reception center, I went to Kela, and when Kela said no I went to the foodbanks, but maybe I should have just practiced for longer because I do not know what went wrong, I do not know what went wrong but the imagined is oozing now, the imagined is taking on a material form, I see it as I drive through this city, I see it as I walk through this city, as I crawl, as I lay face down, I can see everything very clearly now, the bodies that have been living in my head are the bodies on these streets, the carcasses of my homes are these homes, and the dogs run free, but the armament, the armament has only ever been yours.
2024-2026
/ Suspension in Other Terms / Photography / Finland
Suspension in Other Terms originated as a site-specific photography exhibition situated in a glass-walled room of a refugee reception center in Salo (FI), where it remained on view for six weeks for the center’s ~200 residents. The site itself, a former mental health hospital with little renovation, carries forward its history of institutionalisation in its architecture and spatial hierarchies. There, the residents, unable to choose their placement, live in overcrowded rooms with minimal privacy and remain under constant CCTV surveillance in corridors, while being officially termed as Migri’s customers—a paradoxical shard of bureaucratic language that obscures the profound deprivation of agency characterizing their situation. With this project, I suggest that the building does not reflect those who inhabit it but inducts them into the locally culturally constructed category of the “refugee,” encoded in the material and spatial logic of the place.
The project began when the Finnish cultural organization Ko-Koo-Mo invited me to co-create socially engaged encounters at the site in late 2024. Visiting the site almost daily for 1,5 months, I listened to residents’ concerns while documenting the political dimensions of the reception center’s spatial arrangements with my film camera. I continued the visits until 2026, ultimately producing over 400 photographs. The initial exhibition of the project was conceived as a re-presentation of the immediate material conditions of the site, aimed at re-visibilizing the naturalized agents of state control embedded within it while acknowledging my own, photographer’s, surveilling gaze—only reversed, here turned back at the institution instead of its residents. Through patterned presentation of positives and negatives, alongside visible de- and re-constructions of photographic prints, the work reflects on suspension as a generalized refugee condition: bureaucratic, spatial, and temporal waiting; repeated confrontations with death; and enforced reconfigurations of self.
In 2026, this project was also exhibited at Salon Seurakunta Galleria (FI) (”Suspension in Other Terms,” solo).
Images above: Stanislava Ovchinnikova, digital scan of film photographs, 2024-2026, from the series Suspension in Other Terms.
Suspension in Other Terms, installation front view from the first project exhibition in the reception center (Salo, Finland). Photo by Stanislava Ovchinnikova, 2025. Suspension in Other Terms, installation side view from the first project exhibition in the reception center (Salo, Finland). Photo by Stanislava Ovchinnikova, 2025.
2022-2023
/ The Home Will Come Again / Photography
Between 2022 and 2023, I kept a photographic diary through a sequence of relocations, of which at the time there were nearly two dozen. Life felt like being caught in a rip current—a narrow flow moving away from the shore, cutting through breaking waves. My shore was Ukraine. Upon leaving it, I was carried into the open sea, powerless to control speed or direction. Places and objects around me became blurred; they were not themselves but, rather, ideas of themselves, symbols. I returned to photography with the intention of grounding myself in the world: this is a table, this is a plate on the table, this is breakfast on the plate on the table. But the camera too betrayed me, amplifying disorientation instead of resisting it.
While shaping these images into an exhibition series, it became even more evident to me that what they visibilize is not the movement per se. Rather, to me, they portray the distortion of spatial and perceptual registers of the environment amid the rip of displacement.
Diptych, Untitled #2 and #3. Film photography, Stanislava Ovchinnikova, 2022Untitled #7. Film Photography, Stanislava Ovchinnikova, 2022Untitled #6. Film Photography, Stanislava Ovchinnikova, 2022Untitled #12. Film Photography, Stanislava Ovchinnikova, 2022
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Thank you.
Stanislava Ovchinnikova, 2026
stanislavaovchinnikova@gmail.com