With Feathers, 2022- ongoing
In the With Feathers project, photographs coexist with printed text, where the text functions as my diary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the photographs of birds act as stand-ins for the narrator’s emotional state. The series began in Kyiv in 2022 as an attempt to find tenderness in images of decorative birds, but it evolved into its opposite: the horror of captivity, exile, and loneliness. At first, I wrote these texts as a Ukrainian artist who grew up in Russia and returned to her homeland, and I continue this project as a person trapped by bureaucracy in statelessness.
The work opens with reflections on the impossibility of continuing photographic practice as it existed before. It addresses the intense psychological pressure felt by both myself and those around me.
The world around the viewer unravels into the emotional oppression of war: I share the pain of isolation and the grief of losing family members on both sides of the border. Pictorially the project oscillates between photographs with and without text and a few centerpiece fragments that only have the text. These elements attest to the closed nature of the inner world of trauma.Two fragments of text without photographs take the form of lists: all the addresses I could remember living at, and the places where I celebrated my birthday. These text fragments exist as an imaginary set of vernacular photographs with these solitary visions emphasizing the emptiness that displacement left in my life. Finally the viewer is confronted with a cityscape photographed from above, with an awkward movement towards the edge of the fence: evidence of suicidal thoughts or the miraculous flight of a flightless bird that is about to happen.
The viewer is invited to stand outside the thin walls of the zoo and the world, where at any moment they could find themselves inside, behind bars. In the series With Feathers, the birds are shown in fruitless attempts to hide from the watchful gaze above. They are pressed by their isolation and their desire for closeness, demonstrating an unrelenting desire to live free despite their condition.