The home

2019

2021 Group exhibitions “OBJECT № 4” /gallery FFTN, Sankt-Petersburg, Russia

2020 virtual collection Home Museum, LagosPhoto Festival 2020

2021  Newspaper OBJECT № 4 /Sankt-Petersburg, Russia


The project mediums: photography, video, installation

I spent the biggest and most important part of my childhood in an old log house in the Norskoye village near Yaroslavl, where we lived with my grandparents. 

In the 1930s on the Volga, next to our city, under the resolution of the USSR State Planning Committee, the construction of a storage reservoir began. The house that belonged to my great-grandfather’s family was the flood zone. Therefore, it was dismantled by logs and transported to the opposite high bank of the Volga, 57 pines were uprooted on the uncultivated area and the house was put together again. 

In 2008, after the death of my grandfather, the house was demolished. In its place the parents built a new one, where they now live with my grandmother. Granny is 89 years old, she is losing her memory: with each passing day, there are less and less recollections. Granma forgets where she is and what she is doing, but she can still remember me and some events of her distant past. 

What will remain of a person if all her memories disappear, if instead of yesterday and today there is a blank slate?

There are very few things left from the old house that are memorable for me: 

a teddy bear, one year younger than me; 

a box with buttons; 

a tin from tea; 

a broken pocket watch; 

beads; 

grandmother’s dresses; 

an icon; 

some family albums; 

the old cupboard in the barn; 

the carpet that hung over my bed; 

the World map; 

a nightdress;

an iron blue lamp.

All of them have not found their place in the present, have become unnecessary and are aimlessly gathering dust on the shelves of various cabinets. 

When I go through the albums with family photographs and touch old things, I again turn to the experiences of childhood in order to build inside myself an image-memory of a home that does not exist. I create my own refuge to find a sense of security in the present. This is my way to resist oblivion and try to feel the connection to the past.