According to my degree, I’m a specialist in teaching methodology for the French language. I worked for several years as a schoolteacher, while also being interested in photography. Around 2010, I was invited to teach a photography course at a photo studio in Moscow.

A little earlier, I had my first solo exhibition — I think it was in 2007. At that time, when traces of the unstable 1990s were still palpable in Russia, few people talked about photography at all. I created a very strange project, where I photographed apples as a metaphor for humanity’s intrusion into nature — driving nails and staples into them, sewing them with threads, and so on. I won a photography contest in a local gallery, and was offered a solo show with this project.

Many of my school colleagues came to that exhibition and whispered among themselves that they didn’t understand any of it, that the photos were strange and "wrong." The very fact of such an exhibition seemed to them incompatible with the image of a "serious" teacher. That’s when I realized I had chosen the wrong environment. I left the education system and have never again been affiliated with any state institutions.

A difficult question that regularly stumps me and forces me to rewrite my artist statement on the website about once a year.

There’s a lot that interests me, but if I had to generalize, I’d point to the issue of the loss of universal meaning, and the different ways people search for or "construct" it.

I think it’s important that humans are a species that keenly and clearly perceives the absence of a rational design (despite all sorts of illusions) and is acutely aware of the finiteness of life in advance. (Maybe there are other beings that sense something similar — I don’t know — but I can say this for humans with certainty.)

I’m interested in observing how political and religious doctrines are built and collapse, how worldviews clash and test the conceptual strength of their dogmas, how traditionalism comes into conflict with new scientific knowledge, how the notion of "truth" is reconstructed depending on what kind of truth is needed by a privileged community, how the phenomenon of faith operates — especially in contexts where faith itself is denied at the level of ideology.

But of course, it’s impossible to work with all of this at once. Given the socio-political situation in my country, and the rather noticeable rightward shift in global politics, I focus on processes that, in my view, are "problematic," destructive, and threaten the freedom of "unprivileged" and marginalized communities. One such example is the hidden "Orthodox dictatorship" in Russia, which I address in my project.

Yes, research does play an important role in my work. I study the social, political, and other contexts of the places I work with. That said, this research often remains behind the scenes, at the preparatory stage, so it’s not visible to the viewer directly. But maybe in future projects I’ll try to include this layer into the work itself — we’ll see.

The more the contemporary world and image-making methods develop — especially in light of AI — the more I feel is required from an artist, beyond just creating photographs. I want to try out new strategies, expand my practice, and search for forms of expression that respond to the rapidly changing world.

This is a project about people I don’t understand, yet to whom I belong. Or rather, I do understand them, but I feel their worldview is very distant from my own. And at the same time, the project is about me — my cultural experience, my identity — because, whether I like it or not, I was raised and shaped by these people and this culture.

I’m talking about contemporary "Russian Orthodoxy" and trying to consider it as an active and possibly key mechanism for constructing hierarchical relationships between people and power in Russia.

Through my photographs I visualize a world where it becomes normal to see a sign calling for silence in church — in the form I used as the title of my project (yes, it’s a quote, just a request not to talk in the temple); a world in which the president of a secular state, during an official press conference, declares that there is no authority except from God and promises people heaven (literally) in the event of nuclear war; a world in which churchgoers sincerely associate religion with love and peace, yet remain indifferent to the clearly militaristic stance of their church, which justifies Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and officially states that "Orthodoxy is incompatible with the ideas of pacifism"…

My project directly reflects my own identity. I am a direct product of the culture that I’m rethinking and criticizing — but I do this from within, still being part of it.

Once, someone close to me said that a relationship with the "motherland" often resembles the attachment of an adult but emotionally dependent son to a neurotic mother: you always return to her, even when you hate her; you always seek someone who reminds you of her.

As for connections with my previous projects — I don’t think there is a direct link, but there are indirect, less obvious ones, which I’d rather let an interested viewer trace on their own.

As I mentioned earlier, my goal was to reflect on contemporary neo-Orthodox ideology and the mindset it cultivates. I’d like to add another key aspect I haven’t mentioned yet — visual language.

It was important to me to visualize this ideology not with "my own" authorial means, but with its own tools. For that, I spent quite a bit of time studying Orthodox iconography, frescoes, architecture, and the structure of church space.

I wanted to create the effect of conventional visual symbols — but modified, deconstructed through plot, through the meaning of what I was photographing. I wanted to turn the weapons of my "opponent" — the methods of visual influence used in religious propaganda for centuries — against them.

In the end, if a photograph carried this kind of duality, I kept it in the series. If it didn’t — I excluded it. That was the main criterion for selecting the final edit of the project.

I wouldn’t say there were entire periods, but there was one major turning point for rethinking things — a moment of searching for grounding, etc. — February 24, 2022, the day of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. After that, Russian artists found themselves largely cut off from the global art community. (And I’m genuinely grateful that institutions like yours continue to support our work, focusing on its essence rather than the authors' nationality.)

After that point, I had to reconsider many things: how can I speak about Russia and its culture now? Can I continue the projects I’d started in the form I originally intended?

That moment made the rift in our community very clear — or rather, it had always existed, but now both black and white became more visible. I don’t like strong contrasts — they often oversimplify — but sometimes, in key moments, they’re necessary to clearly state your position, to understand which side you’re on, without caveats, without shades of grey.

Yes, in the near future I plan to start working on a long-term project dedicated to the erasure of certain layers of historical memory, as well as the physical destruction of objects and territories whose existence is inconvenient for the current regime in Russia.

I hope that in a few years I’ll be able to present this work to a wider audience.