Artist statement
Encountering my work is like entering a quiet, charged space, where I do not try to assert myself, but simply allow the gaze to be. My practice stands between conceptual rigor and emotional openness. Rather than offering answers, I create conditions for questions to emerge — spaces where viewers meet their own capacity for empathy, reflection, and recognition.
Today, when everything rushes and disappears, my works are intentionally quiet, slow, and attentive.
There is one question that never leaves me: what does it truly mean to be human? It keeps me searching, looking closely at someone — or something — until their fragility begins to breathe.
By transferring my identity in the project “Contract” or sharing empathy with an artificial body in “Me/Her”, I show how fragile and changeable the “self” can be. In the photo series “Market”, I look closely at how people become almost invisible, and in “Report Ivangorod” I cross real borders in order to understand inner ones. In the video If “I Were Water, I Would Swim Towards the Blue Light”, I let memory dissolve like a body in water.
Each work becomes both mirror and microscope, revealing the delicate architectures of identity, memory, and connection that define our shared humanity. By choosing deliberately uncomfortable subjects and maintaining an unflinching yet compassionate gaze, my work contributes to ongoing conversations about vulnerability, authenticity, and the role of art in fostering genuine human connection.
In a cultural moment often characterized by superficial engagement and performative emotion, I offer sustained attention as both artistic method and ethical stance. Rooted between Russian and Estonian cultures, my perspective carries a sensitivity to borders — physical, emotional, and linguistic — which has shaped how I understand belonging and distance.
In a moment when visibility often replaces understanding, I want to slow the act of seeing back into something human. My work reminds us that the most profound human experiences resist easy categorization or conclusion. What I offer is not resolution, but attention: a way of staying in the delicate space between presence and disappearance. Through this approach, I invite viewers into a shared space of inquiry, where the act of looking becomes a form of care, and attention itself becomes a radical practice.
Perhaps this is the task of art now — to hold space for tenderness, and to keep asking what it means to be human, even when the answer keeps changing.