Digesting inherited hi/stories through concrete and paper
Sculpture, collage, and photobooks rooted in personal stories and big histories — exploring how individual lives echo, resist, and survive the weight of larger political forces.
resilience
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modular
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fragmented
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reconstruction
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parts
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rearranged
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whole
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resilience ✳︎ modular ✳︎ fragmented ✳︎ reconstruction ✳︎ parts ✳︎ rearranged ✳︎ whole ✳︎
Breaking apart. Putting back together.
I'm a multidisciplinary artist whose work centers on a single question: how do people reconstruct themselves after difficult life periods? My own story - leaving Moscow in March 2022, moving through Armenia and the UAE before settling in the Bay Area - is the lab in which this question lives.
II graduated from the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA Moscow) and worked as an artist and photographer in Russia for over a decade, exhibiting in Russia, Japan, Hungary, France and other countries. I now work as an individual artist and as art instructor at Pacific Art League (Palo Alto).
My two primary materials - concrete and paper - are deliberate opposites. Concrete carries the weight of the Soviet modernist world I came from: permanent, institutional, heavy. Paper is what survives displacement: fragile, portable, adaptable. Together they describe a life.
BINOM
BINOM began with grief and a box of photographs. Going through my father's archive after his death, I discovered he had lived a life entirely hidden from our family: more than 25 years as a KGB cryptographer, developing encryption algorithms for the Soviet state. The personal became political, the intimate became historical. BINOM is a dual-volume photobook that moves between these two registers: family album and state archive, private memory and public propaganda, one man's silence and an entire country's system of secrets.
Selected works
