Self-Reflection

In this ongoing self-portrait series, I reflect on womanhood, identity, equality, and human rights, while examining vulnerability, insecurity, and the search for self as both woman and artist, through visual symbolism and classical painting references.

Begun nine years ago, this ongoing series of self-portraits serves as a visual documentation of the artist’s life, shaped by both intimate personal experiences and broader social and political realities. Through sustained self-reflection, the work engages with universal themes such as the questioning of identity, fear of the unknown, experiences of misogyny and inequality, disconnection from one’s roots, shame, anger, bodily transformation, and self-sacrifice.

Kristina Varaksina is consistently positioned against stark white backdrops, her body transformed, obscured, or marked by materials that subtly shift across the series, marking the passage of time. These interventions function as both physical and psychological thresholds, suggesting states of transition, loss, protection, and enforced silence, while reflecting the tension between visibility and concealment.

The work carries a deliberately claustrophobic quality—a contemporary echo of classical painting — where tightly framed compositions deny escape. Varaksina meets the viewer’s gaze directly and unrelentingly, collapsing the distance between observer and subject. The repeated use of the self-portrait resists idealization, instead revealing the body as a site of endurance, fragility, and confrontation, shaped by both personal history and external forces.

Guided by an ongoing inquiry into the insecurities and self-searching of a woman and artist, the series places emotion at its core. Varaksina focuses on translating interior states into visual form, allowing private experiences to surface through gesture, material, and gaze. By drawing attention to personal emotions, the work invites viewers to recognize their own internal struggles within these images, positioning the personal as collective, political, and deeply human.