KSENIAVOY.ART - Works

The series of sculptures in the exhibition is built around old black-and-white childhood photographs transformed into personal altars.

While these works appear gentle, feminine, and perhaps even cute, they reflect the difficult experience of growing up in the shadow of the freshly fallen Soviet Union in the 1990s - an in-between space between two totalitarian periods in Russian history.

Post-Soviet Russia was a brief interlude of chaotic bloom: a pop-cultural boom and a fleeting moment of freedom of speech, a few gasps of intoxicating fresh air in a long history of censorship. However, it was also a time of deep inequality as the early “wild west” of capitalism entwined with organized crime. This strange era shaped many lost people and free children, roaming unsupervised, detached from the grip of screens, slipping through the gaps of adult exhaustion and distraction.

Growing up as a noticeably neurodivergent child in these conditions gave the artist a distinct view of this reality. She witnessed cultural openness colliding with patriarchal, hierarchical, and totalitarian traditions of behavioral norms and education, amplified in the societal treatment of a queer and noticeably neurodiverse child.

The sculptures talk about transition, lost voices, marginalization, and both generational and individual trauma. Using a soft, feminine visual language, the artist embellishes childhood photographs through her technique of ritualistic collage - an ikebana-like approach. With that, the raw edges of complicated memories are offered tenderness and understanding that was once scarce. The results are altars to complicated love, familiar structures, and generational trauma.

By reflecting on the intertwined histories of generations before and her own, the artist is present as a child, as well as an adult anthropologist, a romantic storyteller, and a sensitive poet. The process of remembering becomes as much about reclaiming what was lost as it is about accepting the enduring sorrow that lingers while healing. Each work becomes a respectful, personal monument to the complexity of post-Soviet life, childhood, family, and to the enduring possibility of transformation through art.