Your work revolves around practices of dark and gloomy twists and metamorphosis. How did your journey into this very specific aesthetic start? 

I have always been creative, but I didn’t make any attempts to make it a profession until September 2019, just 3 years ago, after moving from Kyiv to Rome. An engineer and 3d animator in the past, I had no knowledge about the world of contemporary art.  But there was a desire. At first, I went to an academic drawing course, then painted motley and ambitiously huge canvases. That time I thought that I would have probably continued with painting. However, I’ve never gotten proper satisfaction from the process. It seemed very monotonous to me, something was missing.  One morning I just woke up with the idea of ​​making something 3-dimensional.  I had no  sketch or knowledge about materials.  But somehow everything turned out exactly how I imagined, which never happened to me in painting.  Moreover, my body was in motion all the time while working on the sculpture, a kind of dance came out, I constantly slid around the work, never being static. Along with sculpture came an interest in performance, installation and video. I wanted to combine all into one whole world, into a visual tale or a quasi-theatrical play.
This desire sharply escalated after my first solo show MORULA in July, curated by Stefania Plaza Mora in the off-site temporary space Piano Zero. In just one month, I managed to create a massive site-specific installation, with the supportive team of my incredible man Oleksandr Radomskyi and curator Stefania, in collaboration with Australian artist and director Finn O’Hanlon, composer Michele Papa, american textile artist and printmaker Tilde Kay Snyder, and with the help of 1st assistant director Gabriella Trulli, writer Nika Varlamova, artists Damiano Tata and Flaminia Maura. “Morula” occupied 64 square meters of space in total. It consists of eleven sculptural objects, one massive wooden structure, splashing out to the corridor, sound installation, video and performance. I think this was the culminating moment in my practice, after which a new page has started.

The materials that you used for your sculptures and for the curated space featured in ‘Balia’, your latest short film are very interesting and particular. How did you find your way to these materials? How do they resonate with the concepts of your art and what you want to communicate to the audience? 

As you correctly noted, I use a wide range of organic and unconventional materials.  My favorites are: burned sugar, soy milk, fallen tree branches and natural latex wraps. I started to use sugar and foodstuffs when I had no money to buy any sculpture materials at the end of  2020.  So I simply started to create sculptures using the goods found in the kitchen. With the large scale wooden structures, which can be considered temporary architecture, I focus on the construction of “animated temples”, sort of a hybrid creations – “living houses”, both inanimate structures and alive creatures at the same time. They often frame ritualistic performances. Assembled from diverse materials – fallen branches and animal bones, leaking with burned sugar substance –  they are often inhabited by the ants, who bring life inside, but also exaggerate the repulsion of the viewer. The first attempt on these temporary temples was made with the support of the band Archivio Futuro, when we collaborated on their music video and performance “Deserto Giallo”. In the video and live performance BALIA, I was choking with soy milk, coming from a medical IV bag, mounted into the woodlice-alike womb. My eyes were glued with silicone, which made me completely blind during the performance to exaggerate a feeling of a newborn creature, a “blind puppy”. “Balia” is the first act of an ongoing project, which tells us a story of an entity going through the intense, even violent  process of metamorphosis. In my opinion, the use of organic materials, foodstuffs and liquids, create an extremely corporeal effect, that accuses strong emotional response from the spectator.
They bolster the feeling of the alien and odd, always present in my works and evoke an underlying tension between erotism and abjection. Characters clothed in skin-tight latex wraps, silicone suits fused with medical tubes and supplies, sugar “tentacles” sprouting from the masks, constantly melting and exuding liquid as if they were bleeding, they embroiled into phantasmagoric ritual, and framed by an eerie tree root structures, whether architectural or alive – all this plunges us into very personal and strange journey through the world at the same time modern and archaic, not really a human one, but rather chimerical and alienating.

Your work reconnects with a world of the absurd and the uncanny, an imaginary world that you made tangible and visible to the audience. Can you talk about the creatures born in this world, Golem and Bastet, they have some human features, especially Bastet, what were your inspirations in creating these beings? 

Let’s start with Bastet. Although she is the second sculpture I made after the Golem, she has a direct connection with where I would like to lead my artistic practice in the future. With the following projects, I would like to plunge the audience into dystopian realm stratified on dominant and submissive castes: voyeurs and executors, involved in the performance of phantasmagoric rites, that distort and transform participants, and often involve the erotic confluence of executors with the elements of non- human chimerical nature. Bastet-alike creatures are representatives of the dominant voyeurs caste. They are some sort of divinised bystanders. They almost never take part in the ritual directly, but often act as masters of ceremonies.
Voyeurs are deified and fetishized. They look alike erotic dolls, with hyper-feminized proportions, lack of clear facial features, as if hidden by a latex mask, naturalistic genitals, they often have many limbs.  They constitute both single figures and multi-figured “balls of bodies”, twisted together. In the next project I am dreaming about now, I want to make a costume of the Voyeur for myself and literally become her during the performance. As for the Golem, it was my first sculpture and a “bridge” between colorful paintings and the creation of uncanny immersive worlds, combining sculpture, performance, installation and video.
In Jewish mythology, Golem is a mythical anthropomorphic creature created from inanimate matter, usually clay or mud. The sculpture represents 4 roughly sculpted figures, human blanks frozen in either an act of confluence or a struggle. The black angular silhouette looks both tightly knocked down and disintegrating.