SELECTED WORKS FROM THE SERIES:

Beautiful Prisoners (2020) was created in response to the Belarusian government’s mass imprisonment of political opponents, artists, writers, journalists, and cultural figures — a campaign of repression that continues to this day. Constructed through layers of torn paper, painted gesture, and fragmented imagery, the work transforms the motif of birds into a meditation on captivity, solidarity, and the persistence of inner freedom under authoritarian violence.

White doves emerge from and dissolve into a dense network of dark forms and fractured surfaces. Their bodies appear unfinished, partially obscured, as though caught between disappearance and survival. The composition resists fixed boundaries: figures overlap, merge, and crowd one another, evoking both confinement and collective endurance. The dark branching structures cutting through the work suggest prison bars, fractures, or systems of control pressing against fragile organic life.

Collage becomes both material and metaphor. Torn fragments are held together precariously, carrying traces of rupture, censorship, memory, and repair. The delicate surfaces and muted palette create an atmosphere of suspended silence, reflecting the psychological reality of fear, isolation, and uncertainty experienced under political repression. Yet the birds continue to move through the composition, insisting on tenderness, imagination, and the possibility of spiritual resistance even within conditions designed to erase individuality.

Beautiful Fighters (2022) was created in response to the war in Ukraine. Using collage and paint, the work transforms images of doves into symbols of fragility, defiance, and survival. Set against a deep blue field and a fractured golden ground, the birds appear suspended between flight and struggle, their bodies assembled from torn fragments of decorative paper, printed material, and painted gesture.

Traditionally associated with peace, the doves here become ambiguous figures — graceful yet alert, vulnerable yet resistant. Their wings, constructed from delicate patterns and broken surfaces, carry traces of both beauty and damage. The radiant yellow beneath them evokes fields of grain and sunlight, while also suggesting scorched earth and instability. Together, the colours inevitably recall the Ukrainian flag, though the work resists direct illustration in favour of emotional and symbolic resonance.

As throughout the wider series, collage functions as a language of fragmentation and repair. Torn materials are reassembled into temporary forms of wholeness, reflecting the tension between destruction and endurance during wartime. The work asks how tenderness, beauty, and the imagination might continue to exist within conditions shaped by violence and historical rupture.

Unequal Battle (2023) was created in response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Combining painting with layered collage, the work brings together torn textiles, fragments of printed material, and gestural brushwork to construct a fractured psychological landscape suspended between violence and tenderness.

At the centre of the composition, a partially obscured figure emerges and dissolves simultaneously, suggesting both vulnerability and resistance. Dark painterly forms press against pale, unfinished surfaces, while decorative fabrics and domestic textures become entangled with ruptured black passages that evoke destruction, smoke, and displacement. The collision between intimacy and catastrophe reflects the disorienting experience of witnessing war unfold across a shared cultural and historical geography.

"I HAVE A LOVE-HATE RELATIONSHIP WITH MY WORK.
STRIVING FOR PERFECTION, I GIVE IT MY ALL. THEN
I WANT TO THROW IT TO THE FEET OF THE FIRE." 

About

Swan Lake (2023–2024) borrows its title from Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s ballet, which Soviet television famously broadcast on repeat during moments of political collapse and transition — including the period surrounding the announcement of Stalin’s death, when official silence preceded public acknowledgement. In this work, the ballet becomes both historical echo and psychological metaphor: a choreography of symmetry, doubling, concealment, and power.

The large-scale composition is structured around mirrored white swans emerging from an intricate field of collage. Their bodies appear almost identical yet subtly altered, invoking the idea of chirality — forms that resemble one another but cannot be perfectly superimposed, like left and right hands. Through this principle, the work reflects on repetition within history: political systems, cultural memory, and human behaviour reproducing themselves in altered but recognisable forms across generations.

The swans function simultaneously as emblems of grace, myth, propaganda, and collective performance. Their theatrical whiteness stands in tension with the densely layered background of urban fragments, textiles, decorative patterns, and architectural imagery, where beauty and instability coexist. The symmetrical arrangement suggests ritual, state spectacle, or ceremonial order, yet the surface itself remains fractured and unstable, resisting total coherence.

As throughout the wider series, collage becomes a method for thinking through historical rupture and emotional contradiction. Torn materials accumulate like sedimented memory, carrying traces of private life alongside collective trauma. Swan Lake explores how power aestheticises itself, how repetition shapes consciousness, and how fragile differences persist inside structures that attempt to impose sameness.

Feather (2026) is among the most recent works in the series and accompanies the lines: “so / perfect and light, so / incomplete.” Reduced to a near-minimal image, the painting isolates a single white feather suspended within a dark field, creating a space of stillness, fragility, and unresolved presence.

In contrast to the density and fragmentation of earlier collage works, Feather approaches absence through restraint. The black surface functions less as background than as atmosphere — an uncertain expanse against which the feather appears momentary, vulnerable, almost vanishing. Painted with delicate attention to texture and weightlessness, the feather becomes both trace and remainder: something shed, carried away, or left behind.

The work reflects on incompleteness not as failure, but as a condition of being. Lightness here coexists with loss; beauty with transience. Stripped of narrative and excess, the image invites a contemplative encounter with impermanence, silence, and the fragile persistence of form.