Art did not become my profession because I was trained for it. It became my language because everything else shifted.

This photograph speaks of endurance. Of a creativity born not only from inspiration, but from discipline.

At first, it appears unspectacular. By today’s standards, it looks almost disarmingly unposed, far from the logic of a selfie. There is no constructed angle, and precisely there it shows endurance without announcing it. A form of creativity shaped by discipline, repetition, and the body’s memory.

If you look closely, you can immediately see that the bare feet have worked. They carry traces of ballet: pressure marks, plasters. In my hands, an analog film, and attention for what is not yet allowed to exist.

In the background, framed, a sketch of Michelangelo’s Dying Slave. Artistic practice here is not only a discipline rehearsed over many years, but an experience that tells itself because it is visible.

This vintage photograph is a quiet document from the 1990s, with a film container in my hands and a drawing of Michelangelo’s Dying Slave in the background

Some biographies unfold effortlessly along a linear path. But others follow a chronology of their own. They create order through shifts, not through time.

For a long time, it can be difficult to know whether a memory belongs to a specific moment in time or to its significance. Perhaps because some lives are not held together by stations, but by transitions. Rooms I inhabited without ever fully arriving. Languages that surrounded me without ever quite feeling native. And an artistic practice that, for a long time, seemed to be the only place where something like belonging was possible.

I was born in 1981 in Novovolynsk, a small town in western Ukraine, which at the time was still firmly anchored in Soviet reality. When I speak of a happy childhood, I do so with care, because this happiness was not a condition that simply existed on its own. It was an achievement. A collective effort. Carried by a family that did not find stability, but kept creating it again and again. Against challenging conditions, against scarcity, against a reality that rarely felt stable.

It lies so far back now that memory begins to soften around it. Like ink dropped into a glass of milk. From a distance, life in Soviet Ukraine can begin to look like a brief, unstable episode. In truth, its roots ran deep through generations, forming the fragile foundation beneath everything. I remember turning on the taps and watching rust come out instead of water. Even this could feel like a sign, as though the infrastructure itself had lost faith in permanence. What should have been held by reliable systems and institutions was quietly returned to the private language of guilt and shame.

People learned early to live beneath the surface. To adapt, always and everywhere. What appears here early on is adaptation, is not submission, but as a hard-won ability to place something stable against the instability of the world.

Creativity was present. Yet its embodiment lived, historically trained in distance, in intellectual or actual exile. Still, this country was never poor in artistic radicality. Just think of Malevich. Born in Kyiv, later claimed by different histories, and drawn into the fractures of the century. That he came from Kyiv, where my little cousin still lives today with his fiancée, no longer seems like a biographical footnote. It feels more like the signature of a historical, collective experience. A region shaped by overlapping cultures, shifting borders, and the long afterlife of competing histories. Free will appeared only occasionally, like a distant possibility on the horizon. Even Polish radio was jammed, although the Polish border lay almost within walking distance of our dacha.

And then there was our dacha. I grew up with my granny. My grandfather had died a year before I was born, and yet he was present, in the form of an almost finished dacha he had left behind. A promise in an unfinished state. My dad completed it later, not because it promised security, but because it held hope. I helped too, as much as I could. I was already 2, after all.

“привет всем дачникам и неудачникам” *

My grandfather scratched this into the wet cement layer. Fossilized for the lifetime of a house, perhaps longer. A few years later, my father and I pressed our hands beside them. His inscription, my father’s handprints, my tiny hands: all of it held in the concrete foundation of the house. That foundation carried the true logic of the place. Working together. Leaving traces without knowing who might read them one day. Not founding a house on perfect stability, but on return. Coming back. Repairing. Continuing. Enduring. Adapting.

Just as the dacha was a place of improvisation, so was our home. A reminder that what lasts is rarely what was planned. Several generations of us lived in one apartment. My mother was working on her doctoral thesis in Moscow, my father taught philosophy in Lviv. Between all of us lay absences, bus rides, trains, kilometers, and invisible borders measured not only in distance, but in days.

Before my cousin Tyoma was born, my granny, my uncle, and my auntie looked after me whenever my parents couldn’t. They supported me wherever possible. Ballet lessons from the age of three. Seven years of piano lessons, all wasted, because all I wanted was to draw.

Keeping things in place was not about control, but about care. Objects had their place not simply because they were useful, but because they stayed. You put them down so you could return to them later. Or perhaps to reassure yourself that such a later could exist at all.

At some point, I found my auntie’s book from the Louvre. In it, Michelangelo's Dying Slave. I have no real story about this. No date, no occasion. Only the fact that I drew him again and again and again. It was a childhood obsession and an early artistic ambition. In this way, my aunties books from Paris became a doorway before I knew what art history was. This Dying Slave was the first to carry me out of the world as I knew it and into another. He accompanied me for many years because even then he showed me that posture does not mean freedom, but often the opposite. That strength does not reveal itself in escape, but in endurance. Adapting, again.

Early Study After Michelangelo’s Dying Slave

Years later, after several moves and a life spent in different countries with different languages, all these drawings were lost in a flooded basement. Only two photographs remain: one of me as a teenager, sitting in front of the framed sketch. And one analogue photograph showing that I was already experimenting with double exposure at an early age. A strange doubling, an image within an image, a memory of a memory.

Some encounters with art only become clear much later. At the time, they may not seem important at all. Years passed before I understoods what they had opened. When I changed countries, learned languages, and adapted again, art remained the only constant. It could move through all of them without needing to be translated.

My story does not follow a straight line. It’s made up of shifts. At the age of nine, I came moved to Germany, later lived in the United States, and eventually returned to Germany. Between these places lay languages, school systems, cultural codes, and assumptions that had to be reordered each time. Every change of place brought with it another set of rules, another way of locating oneself.

For me, migration meant standing at the edge at first. You listen more than you speak. You read gestures before you understand words. Art accompanied me through all these systems. It required no translation, no comparison, no explanation. Its effect was immediate, bodily, pre-verbal. While forms of belonging kept rearranging themselves, art remained understandable, independent of place, language, or context. Amid the foreign, it proved to be an accessible language understood by many people.

This explains what I could not put into words for so long. Not from an absence of thought, but from caution toward false clarity. There are experiences that tip over the moment they're named. They slide into narratives that are not one’s own. Victim, survivor, exile, rupture. Those are all available terms, all well-intentioned, and yet often too coarse for what was actually lived. In recent years, something has shifted. In recent years, something has shifted. As if you were standing in a room you had known for years, only to realize one day that the furniture had moved and you no longer expected the old collisions.

As necessary as adaptation was in my life, becoming quieter, fitting in, withdrawing parts of my own identity, it was effortless in art. In art, there was no need to translate myself first. The reactions to my art, too, were rarely intellectual. They were instinctive, bodily, immediate. A recognition before understanding. My work today carries this history. The layers, the pigments, the color layers of the Sorbet works poured over months. All of them hold memory, endurance, loss, light, and persistence. They are symbols, and they are lived materiality. This way art became a practice of attention and presence rather than a direct message.

Those who grow up in transitions learn early that nothing is final. That stability is not given, but must be created. And that what carries us is often a small gesture, a ritual, an object that remains although everything else shifts. For me, art belongs in this category. Not as an exception or luxury. As part of everyday life, as something that offers support. For me, art remains a way of staying with an experience before trying to explain it. I follow what it sets in motion. I do not need to say what it is. I notice what it does to me. Sometimes that is enough. A room that remains open. A thought that does not close. A presence that does not want to be explained. In this openness, I do not find uncertainty, but a form of trust. In time. In perception. And in the ability to live with ambivalence without immediately calming it down.

* = “привет всем дачникам и неудачникам”

Literally, it could be translated roughly as:
“Hello to all dacha owners and unlucky ones.”
Or: “Greetings to all dacha people and misfortunates.”

But this is precisely where the challenge of translation begins. The Russian works here with rhyme and an internal shift that is almost impossible to reproduce in English:

дачники (dachniki): people with a dacha, a summer house, a place of retreat, something of their own

неудачники (neudachniki): losers, unlucky ones, those for whom things did not work out

The two words differ only by a single prefix: дача, dacha, something one has or possesses, and неудача, failure or misfortune. In Russian, this creates a laconic resonance that says: having a dacha does not make one a winner. And those who fail still belong.

In English, there is no comparable word family in which possession and failure lie so close together. Every translation must choose. And in doing so loses precisely the wit.