1993-

My childhood is tied to the photographs in an old album, on whose final pages blank spaces remain, a silent witness to a turning point in our relationship, when I was about five years old.

My mother moved to Ufa in the early 1980s, hoping to begin a new, independent life. Some time later, I was born.

I was surrounded by care and love, even though my mother raised me on her own.

My memories of childhood are tied to photographs carefully pasted into an old album. On its last page lies a stack of loose photos and children’s drawings that never found their place. When I was about five years old, something in our relationship changed.

The empty pages of that childhood album became a silent reminder of this shift.

Her leisure changed as well: unfamiliar men, loud New Year’s gatherings.

After the holidays, the adults would leave, and I was left alone with my dependent mother, forced to take on the role of an adult. Household responsibilities became part of my everyday life.

Unable to influence reality, I often found comfort in fantasies and dreams — they became my refuge. Even now, as an adult, I continue to revive the games of my childhood in my memory.

In this project, I return to that unfinished childhood photo album and to the blurred images preserved in my memory. By distorting archival photographs with water, by creating situations and objects, I reconstruct traumatic experience and seek a way to speak about memory through its absence.