STILL LIFE

(2023 - in progress)

SERIES OF ANALOG PHOTOGRAPHS

In 1927, the Church of Seraphim of Sarov at the New Donskoy Cemetery was reconstructed into the first Soviet crematorium and columbarium. The Donskoy Crematorium became not only the first in the USSR but also a symbol of a radical shift in attitudes toward death and corporeality. This place came to represent a new state policy on death—one aimed at severing ties with religion and tradition. 

Funeral rituals are among the most enduring elements of culture. Their transformation reflects profound societal shifts. In the USSR, revolutionary ideology sought to reinterpret death: the dead body was no longer personal—it became an object of state control. The funeral ritual turned into a “technology of forgetting”—a process that standardized, depersonalized, and replaced death with a form of industrial procedure. 

In this project, I paid special attention to artificial flowers — markers of abandonment and perfunctory ritual. They became a point of entry into reflections on the boundaries between personal and collective memory, and on memories that were never allowed to fully form. The series of 35mm analog Still Lifes is a documentary record of loss, an act of appropriating someone else’s memory. All prints are handmade. The archival texture of the prints restores the materiality of loss, allowing memory to remain imperfect. 

The printing process itself becomes a bodily intervention in history — a gesture of resistance to forgetting. As the image passes through the hands, personal memory gains form and becomes a foundation for a new, undisciplined collectivity. All the works were scanned from hand-printed analog photographs — the process itself is an inseparable part of the statement.