Emigration
Escape to Emigration
In 2022, the geopolitical crisis forced me to leave the country. In Russia, I knew exactly who I was and where I stood — which is precisely why I left. But as soon as I was outside that institutional frame, I experienced a profound spatial and psychological disorientation, losing my former bearings regarding location and duration.
The first months became an attempt to regain control over my own time and space, to navigate the radical precarity of identity. Photos I took became evidence of what I was searching for in vain: strength, faith, a moment of peace — an attempt to be someone again, in a world where I did not exist.
In this nomadism and search for a new home, I spent almost a year and a half, moving from Thailand to Ireland and from Istanbul to Seoul, before eventually returning to Moscow. The project grew out of my work with an archive of photographs made during this period.
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Return ticket
A continuation of the project "Escape to Emigration." After a year and a half of forced wandering and a subsequent return to Russia, in 2026 Kseniia Belkova, who shared the experience of exile with me, and I returned to Koh Samui, Thailand.
This had been one of the first places of our nomadic period in spring 2022. But this time we flew there not in a state of paralyzing timelessness: we had round-trip tickets. Having a return ticket completely changed the way we perceived the experience — the refuge now had temporal limits, set by us, not by outside pressure. And yet the experience of the past returned in flashbacks tied to the familiar landscape. The photographs in this project examine how a space that appears, on the surface, paradisiacal can remain a reservoir for the traumatic experience of exile.
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