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Suspension in Other Terms (2025) | Photography
Suspension in Other Terms was a site-specific photography exhibition situated in a glass-walled room of a refugee reception center in Halikko (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. 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. The building does not reflect those who inhabit it but inducts them into the locally culturally constructed category of the “refugee,” encoded in its material and spatial logic.
The project emerged through my invitation by the Finnish cultural organization Ko-Koo-Mo to co-create socially engaged encounters at the site in early 2025. 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, ultimately producing more than 400 photographs. The exhibition was conceived as a re-presentation of the immediate material conditions of the site, re-visibilizing the naturalized agents of state control embedded within it, while acknowledging my own surveilling gaze—here reversed, turned back at the institution rather than 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. Installed in a frequently used corridor, the exhibition directly entered the daily life of residents, with its tone, language, and materials carefully shaped by this unavoidable proximity.
The Home Will Come Again (2022-2023) | 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.
Understanding The Urgency (2023) | Performance
Understanding the Urgency is a site- and situation-specific lecture-performance created as a form of curatorial work presentation for "Unlearning Eastern Europe: Emerging Curators' Platform" at Kaunas Artists' House. It emerges from a personal reckoning with the processes of witnessing underlying the curatorial practice I occasionally engage in as an artist, conducted primarily with the Ukrainian archive of wartime dance films. This performance examines the (im)possibility of developing a witness position through the process of regarding pictorial documentation of violence shared through contemporary digital platforms.
"Commodities that originated as a source of quick dopamine are becoming less and less capable of compartmentalising the violence of their producers and consumers. The result? I open Instagram in the morning, and the first thing I see is a child with a limb blown off, followed by a picture of a beautiful cat, followed by legal advice for protestors in Germany, followed by images from a bombing in my hometown, followed by my friend's beautiful breakfast in the very same city, followed by an image of her beautiful dog, followed—
What is it doing to our capacity to witness and to make sense of reality? What is it doing to our capacity to feel?"
What is it doing to our capacity to witness and to make sense of reality? What is it doing to our capacity to feel?"
The structure of the performance was created with the intention of expanding on and further problematizing the questions examined in the lecture. The text of the lecture was audio-recorded and played to the audience in a warm, gently-lit living room space inside the artists' house while I, the artist, was outside, covering up a hole in the ground, naked amid the cold and snow of November.
“When the russian people blew up the Kakhovka Dam, I was in Finland. I woke up to the images of the flood, already taken by multiple photographers for me to see. Older women, standing amidst their belongings in houses that resembled my grandmother’s, half-full of water. Older men holding saved photographs of their loved ones. Couples kissing and holding each other gently. Water, everywhere. Dogs, struggling against it. It was clear what was going to happen next—if not easily understood right away, then definitely clear from the witnessing and tesifying labour done by the multiple people on the ground calling, and pleading, and shouting into the public space of social media: it will be close to impossible to save everyone unless we get help. Soon, people will start dying: those unable to swim will drown, then will come deaths from dehydration, deaths from disease, the bodies will begin to decompose while in water. The water will keep rising.”
Quotes from: “Understanding the Urgency,” Stanislava Ovchinnikova, 2023