HEAVIER THAN AIR
Photographs printed on silk
The installation is a collage of photographs of women's grave medallions found in Belarus, Ukraine, and Poland. These cracked, chipped, weathered and broken medallions are printed on fabric. Captured in borderland cemeteries — in regions marked by ever-shifting borders and empires — the portraits are anonymous, yet they hold the traces of individual lives lost to official narratives. Through these fragmented images, I engage with the invisible histories of everyday life — the lives of women who did not take part in wars, but endured them. Their stories remain undocumented, silenced by historical memory shaped by conflict, ideology, and state power.
In my work, I contrast the traditional materials of remembrance, such as heavy marble and concrete, with the flexibility and resilience of silk. The portraits echo broken porcelain household items: fragile, damaged, and abandoned. Silk here becomes both a carrier of memory and an act of resistance against forgetting. By creating these silk monuments, I reach toward a history beyond (state) borders — a history marked by the silent absence of women’s biographies. The work recalls something in between a domestic tablecloth and a monument — suspended, unstable — positioned between care and control.
This installation is an ongoing process. I continue to collect new portraits, adding new fragments with each exhibition. These silent witnesses re-enter visual history, remaining mute yet present, shaping a counter-memory of lived, but rarely recorded, experience.
The installation is a collage of photographs of women's grave medallions found in Belarus, Ukraine, and Poland. These cracked, chipped, weathered and broken medallions are printed on fabric. Captured in borderland cemeteries — in regions marked by ever-shifting borders and empires — the portraits are anonymous, yet they hold the traces of individual lives lost to official narratives. Through these fragmented images, I engage with the invisible histories of everyday life — the lives of women who did not take part in wars, but endured them. Their stories remain undocumented, silenced by historical memory shaped by conflict, ideology, and state power.
In my work, I contrast the traditional materials of remembrance, such as heavy marble and concrete, with the flexibility and resilience of silk. The portraits echo broken porcelain household items: fragile, damaged, and abandoned. Silk here becomes both a carrier of memory and an act of resistance against forgetting. By creating these silk monuments, I reach toward a history beyond (state) borders — a history marked by the silent absence of women’s biographies. The work recalls something in between a domestic tablecloth and a monument — suspended, unstable — positioned between care and control.
This installation is an ongoing process. I continue to collect new portraits, adding new fragments with each exhibition. These silent witnesses re-enter visual history, remaining mute yet present, shaping a counter-memory of lived, but rarely recorded, experience.
