“The black night calls my name”  

“The black night calls my name” engages with a conflicted bodily archive — the physical imprint of Russia’s chaotic “wild nineties, ” which persists into the present as a dual sensation of paralyzing fragility and a coiled, defensive tension. 

The nineties in Russia were a decade of total social collapse following the dissolution of the USSR, when chaos, violence, and pervasive lawlessness became the new everyday reality. I lived through that era as a child. Too young to rationally comprehend what was happening, I experienced it on a physical level — through anxiety, vulnerability, hypervigilance. The imagery of this period is primarily rooted in my body rather than in my mind. Memory returns as bodily flashes, and the project gives form to them through self-portraits. 

My work approaches trauma not only as an experience of vulnerability, but also as an environment where it can generate a potential for violence. Such force does not always take the form of an external act; it can emerge as a property of traumatized perception or its potential outcome. To convey this ambivalence, I work with the duality of images: the same frame can hold both fragility and a latent, oppressive threat.

I have not returned to Russia since 2022, and the project was shot in Europe. I sought locations for their ability to provoke in my body the precise somatic echoes of childhood, not for their resemblance to the visual environment of the Russian nineties. In this way, I was physically sensing and re-experiencing these states while shooting. 

This project considers how the legacy of the past continues to operate in the present. Rather than nostalgia for the nineties, I am interested in their ongoing, often unconscious presence — and in how acknowledging this persistence may help trace the roots of current realities.