Stanislava Ovchinnikova

Artistic projects
2026 / The Animal That Therefore You Made Me (Follow)
/ performance, public space intervention
2026 / A Performance for Two (Part 1/4)
/ durational performance, installation
2026 / A Performance for Two (Part 2/4) 
/ text-based performance, installation
2026 / A Performance for Two (Part 3/4)
/ sound-based performance, installation
2026 / A Performance for Two (Part 4/4)
/ premiere: 19.08.26 @ Amos Rex Museum, Helsinki
2026 / Untitled 
/ text, artistic commission of Pori Art Museum
2024-ongoing / Suspension in Other Terms
/ photography
2023 / Understanding The Urgency
/ lecture-performance
2023 / My Mother Told Me Not To Look Men In The Eye
/ video (silent)
2021 / Am I Dead Yet?
/ photography

Curatorial projects
2026 / Bark! (Volume 1) @ HIAP
2025 / Ukraine (working title) @ Critical Gallery, Turku, FI
2024 / 2 Years, 3657 Days @ Kaunas Artists’ House, LT
2023-2024 / Moving in Mayhem @ international touring


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stanislavaovchinnikova (at) gmail.com

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current:
A Performance for Two / Generation 2026 @ Amos Rex Museum
Untitled (text) / De Se - Attitude @ Pori Art Museum

upcoming:
Bark! (Volume 3) / 6.09 @ HIAP Community Room
Dwell Here Residency / September 2026 @ Irish Museum of Modern Art
Bark! (Exhibition) / November 2026 @ Gallery Augusta, HIAP

2026 / Untitled / text

Commissioned by Pori Art Museum on the occasion of De Se - Attitude exhibition / Text is on view in the exhibition hall between 13.6 and 30.08.2026

***

“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.


— Stanislava Ovchinnikova, 2026

With gratitude to Miina Hujala & Arttu Merimaa.

© Stanislava Ovchinnikova, 2016 -