Witnessing
Visual Art Projects
Escapism is a photodocumentary project
Relate Art Residency, supported by the European Union
The project explores both physical and psychological dimensions of escape, examining how individuals respond to adversity.
What does it mean to escape? A fleeting breath, a desperate flight, or a quiet rebellion?
- Act I: The Personal Pulse – Escapism as emotional necessity
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Act II: The Social Mirror – Escapism as cultural symptom
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Act III: The Human Face – Escapism as survival
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Act IV: The Reflective Return – Escapism as healing
In the end, escapism is not an answer—it’s a question. Is it a sanctuary or a trap? A necessity or a privilege?
When does escapism shift from an individual experience to a political consequence?
Are we escaping toward growth, toward healing, toward something better? Or are we evading realities that demand confrontation?
Being-in-itself
Installation. Larnaca Art Biennale. Cyprus
© Oksin
Being-in-itself. A pile of rich, black soil—known as “chornozem” in my native Ukraine—is a powerful symbol of my country, my roots, and the life I once knew.
The words surrounding it—“Source”, “Soil”, “Dust”, “Mud”, “Earth”, “Property”, “Home”, and “Land”—reflect the different meanings this soil can hold, shaped by each person’s experience. The work draws on Immanuel Kant’s notion of the “thing-in-itself”: an object as it exists independently of our perception or representation of it.
Our perception, however, is never independent. It is shaped by our feelings, beliefs, knowledge, and experiences. For me, the smell of wet soil after rain evokes an immediate sense of home, regardless of the country I am in.
Although restrictions on importing soil and agricultural products into the European Union prevent me from recreating the Chornozem installation in its entirety, I still carry a handful of rich, black Ukrainian soil. This gesture follows an old tradition: taking a handful of soil on a long journey as a keepsake, carrying a part of one’s homeland. If the traveller dies abroad, that soil is placed in their grave—“earth to earth, dust to dust”.
Soil, earth, and the Earth itself mean more to me than a point on a map marking my location. I carry my earth with me, and the Earth carries me. We coexist.
Human without skin
Embroidery on a bodysuit. Limassol carnival. Cyprus
© Oksin
Human Without Skin is a textile work that traces the body’s internal structures through intricate embroidery on a garment-like form. Veins and nerves emerge in thread, exposed and unprotected, as though the skin has been peeled away.
The figure is laid bare: raw, vulnerable, and painfully honest. Its anatomy becomes an expression of the emotional dissonance I experience while living in safety as war tears through my homeland. Surrounded by carefree faces and casual conversations, I feel like a body without skin—every nerve exposed, every emotion intensified. I am not okay, and I refuse to pretend otherwise.
The work is a quiet protest against the pressure to appear unaffected. It does not seek to disturb another person’s peace, yet it refuses to conceal pain for the sake of their comfort. It asks how we can coexist when our realities differ so profoundly, and how we can sustain empathy when suffering feels distant.
Human Without Skin reminds us that beneath every surface lies a story—sometimes bleeding, sometimes trembling, always alive.
White Spots
Oil paintings. Jan Garemijnzaal, Brugge, Belgium
Self-portrait, oil on canvas, 100x100
© Oksin
Soldiers, oil on cardboard, 100x80
© Oksin
White Spots is a deeply personal attempt to piece myself back together—and perhaps help others do the same—in the aftermath of the shared tragedy we experienced during the early months of the full-scale invasion. I never intended to exhibit these paintings. They began as private reflections, created in solitude. Gradually, however, they found their way into public view.
The paintings capture fleeting moments in the lives of Ukrainians: scenes that have become part of a harrowing everyday reality, yet rarely reach the headlines. These are the “white spots” in our collective memory—the experiences left unrecorded, the voices lost in the noise. I believe each of us carries such stories, still unfolding and waiting to be told.
Soldiers, oil on cardboard, 100x80
Exhibited at Jan Garemijnzaal, Brugge, Belgium
© Oksin
Refugee, oil on canvas, 100 × 100 cm
Exhibited at Limassol Municipal Art Center – Apothikes Papadaki
Photograph by Yiorgos Stylianou
Two paintings from this series were first exhibited at Jan Garemijnzaal in Bruges, Belgium. Works from the series were subsequently shown at the Ukrainian House in Paphos, Evoke Artist-Run Space in Larnaca, and finally at the Limassol Municipal Arts Center – Apothikes Papadaki, all in Cyprus.
Among the works are two square self-portraits. The first, Refugee, is vivid and chaotic. Its background draws inspiration from Natalya Serhiyevna, a homeless woman who lived in my neighbourhood in Kyiv. She spoke coherently, yet believed she was a theatre and film actress from Buenos Aires. Her clothes and bags were decorated with handmade flowers and bows fashioned from colourful plastic.
When I arrived in Cyprus, displaced and weighed down with bags, I recognised something of myself in her: an eccentric woman telling everyone she was an artist. The distance I had imagined between us disappeared. I thought: I am her.
The second self-portrait is darker. It expresses the raw, corrosive hatred I felt towards the enemy—an emotion so intense that it threatened my own sense of humanity. The painting raises a question I continue to struggle with: how do we remain human in the face of madness?
War is relentless. Each moment brings tragedy, courage, and quiet acts of survival. Countless stories are witnessed by only a few people, yet together those people make up a nation. A young man, barely an adult, caught in the battle for Hostomel. A mother sheltering in a basement in Bucha. Someone held captive, or haunted by the sound of enemy boots. Survivors living with wounds that cannot be seen.
The scale of this suffering is overwhelming. It can make an individual life feel insignificant. Yet that feeling is misleading: the magnitude of the tragedy does not diminish the value of any person within it.
There are tensions among Ukrainians—resentment towards those who left, those who appear indifferent, or those absorbed in their own struggles. It is easy to see others as the “wrong” kind of people. But when we turn from categories to individual lives, from assumptions to faces, we begin to recognise one another’s humanity again.
Everyone has the right to feel despair and anger. What matters is that we remain connected, listen to one another, and make room for experiences different from our own. Through compassion and mutual support, we can find strength together. Even when we cannot change our circumstances, we retain the freedom to decide how we respond.
Self-reconstruction with AI
This digital experiment explores the tension between identity and algorithmic interpretation. Beginning with a self-portrait, I initiated a recursive cycle of erasure and regeneration: first removing half of my face and allowing AI to reconstruct it, then switching sides and repeating the process. With each iteration, the portrait became less mine and more machine — a gradual unraveling of human likeness.
By the seventh cycle, all recognizable traces of a face had vanished and a window with the inscription "Generated images violate user guidelines" appeared on the screen. The work questions the boundaries of authorship, the fragility of self-image, and the point at which digital mimicry overtakes human essence.
Crown of Thorns
Art object. IT Forum, Kyiv, Ukraine
Photograph by Alex Zakletsky
Created during the COVID-19 lockdown, Crown of Thorns combines twisted-pair communication cables with hypodermic needles. These materials bring together two defining aspects of the pandemic: our reliance on technology to maintain human connection and the medical realities shaping our daily lives.
The work draws on the Christian image of the crown of thorns, a symbol of suffering, sacrifice, and faith. Recreated from contemporary materials, it connects this religious imagery with the vulnerability and uncertainty of the pandemic. During a collective crisis, we ask ourselves where we place our trust—in faith, medicine, technology, or one another.
Through this work, I reflect on the profound challenges of staying socially connected during isolation. The cables evoke the digital networks that sustained our relationships, while the needles suggest both medical care and bodily vulnerability. Together, they form a symbol of the transition into an era increasingly shaped by digital media.
Made in Chornobyl
Documentary art project. Kyiv History Museum. Ukraine
Details of the art installation
© Oksin
Made in Chornobyl brings together photography, installation, video, and painting created during an artist residency in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone.
I chose an ordinary, familiar object: a three-litre glass preserving jar filled with water. The jar acts as a lens, distorting whatever is seen through it. Through this “looking glass”, the landscape becomes misshapen, unsettling, or strangely beautiful. Such unexpected beauty can emerge when we look beyond familiar perspectives and accepted conventions.
In a sense, Chornobyl itself resembles this jar: a sealed, contained space that evokes pain, fear, bitterness, and compassion. Walking through Prypiat and the abandoned villages feels like entering a post-apocalyptic landscape, where tragedy has permanently altered our perception of reality.
Amusement park and street view in Prypiat, Chornobyl Exclusion Zone
© Oksin
At the time of my residency, thirty-three years had passed since the evacuation. Nature was gradually reclaiming buildings, streets, and cultivated land, obscuring the traces of human habitation. The Zone had become a refuge for wildlife, including moose, lynx, eagle owls, Przewalski’s horses, and wolves. Dense vegetation was replacing the orderly rows of planted trees. Life continued largely without us, yet human experience remained central to how this landscape was understood and remembered.
Exhibits, prints on textile, 100x 76
© Oksin
During the residency, we followed a simple rule: everything brought into the Zone had to be taken out again. Workers and residents used reusable containers, and I was struck by the absence of the roadside rubbish I had encountered elsewhere. In a place so profoundly marked by human intervention, these everyday acts of care felt especially significant.
When we needed water for painting outdoors, a worker at a Chornobyl café offered to seal it in large preserving jars. This familiar object, so closely associated with Soviet domestic life, became the starting point for my printed textile series, Exhibits.
Noumenon
Collaboration with Ave Libertatemaveamor
Rymi Art Gallery. Ukraine
Hand painted tree-dimensional compositions or ready made objects. 2019
Noumenon is a conceptual art installation that interrogates the boundary between perception and reality. Composed of familiar objects stripped of their conventional function and meaning, the work invites viewers to confront the illusion of significance that arises when essence is lost. What remains is not absence, but a haunting presence — a suggestion of something beyond comprehension.
Inspired by Immanuel Kant’s notion of the thing-in-itself — the noumenon — the project reflects on the impossibility of truly knowing the essence of objects beyond our sensory experience. As Kant wrote, “Knowledge refers to phenomena, and things in themselves remain incomprehensible.” This philosophical tension becomes the foundation for a visual meditation on pure reason and its antinomies.
The artists draw further influence from Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, engaging in a symbolic “play” that reimagines corporate aesthetics and artistic language. Through monochromatic graphics and ambiguous visual narratives, the installation unfolds without a clear origin or conclusion. Each symbolic image opens a new associative pathway, challenging the viewer to navigate meaning without the anchor of familiarity.
Noumenon is not a search for answers, but a confrontation with the unknowable — a poetic gesture toward what lies beyond the veil of perception.
Katherines
Photo documentary art project. National center "Ukrainian House"
Katherines
Photo series, video-installation, Photo-motion, white screen, projector, faux fur, fan. 2017-2019
Inspired by “Katherina” poem written by T.G. Shevchenko Following the footsteps of established writers and photographers, I chose the way of critical metaphors, rethinking the fate of modern day "Katherines" . I follow them to the real rock bottom, meet "Les Miserables" who exploit the position they are in.I travel to the forgotten "underbelly" of Ukrainian villages and find my "heroines": welfare-less mothers with more children that they can provide for. I saw them as stuck in their destructive "comfort zone", unwilling to change anything about the way they live. On the other hand, limited access to the information and the outside world at large makes such changes almost impossible and the grim scenario is bound to continue.
Foodstuffs portraits
Series of shawls. Modern Art Research Institute of Art Academy of Ukraine
Foodstuffs portraits. Series of shawls. Digital fabric printing 100x76 cm 2019
The array of things that a person puts on a supermarket's moving belt creates an instant portrait of his or her personality. Two loaves of bread, a bottle of Vodka and bottle of baby formula. We know nothing about this customer, however the brain involuntarily makes conclusions based on our imagination edited by experience. Issues of alcohol abuse, child abuse or are we just prejudiced? And then even more scenarios come up in our head. What I'm trying to point out is that art can’t make someone a better person or citizen all by itself. Multidimensional approach should be used - where different institutions such as family, education system, morals and propaganda, environment work together to achieve a holistic influence on a person. Art in this system could be means of reaching moral or educational goals, creating awareness, raising uncomfortable questions. In skillful hands.
Womb
Video-installation. Modern Art Research Institute of Art Academy of Ukraine
“Womb” — A Sanctuary of Sound, Flesh, and Memory
In my video installation Womb, I invite viewers into the very cradle of human existence: the uterus. This work is not merely visual—it is visceral, auditory, and deeply personal. Created during my pregnancy, the installation features real-time recordings of my unborn son’s heartbeat, layered into an imagined interior of the womb, painted as I envisioned it from within. It offers not only a space to witness, but to inhabit—to feel suspended inside the intimate, unseen beginning of life.
At first glance, Womb seems to be a tribute to motherhood. But upon deeper engagement, it is an unflinching portrait of birth as both miracle and trauma. This duality is core to the artist’s narrative: that childbirth, though celebrated in its symbolism, is endured in silence. Women’s stories of pain, fear, and survival in giving life are buried beneath centuries of cultural expectations and evolutionary consequence.
The installation does not romanticize the experience. Instead, it confronts viewers with the physiological and emotional toll that pregnancy and birth exact on the female body. As humans evolved to walk upright and accommodate increasingly complex brains, the female pelvis narrowed, the infant head expanded, and childbirth became exponentially more dangerous. This evolutionary tradeoff is invisible in our everyday assumptions, yet it shadows every delivery with pain, vulnerability, and potential loss.
At its core, Womb is about isolation. Even in the most supported circumstances, birth is a solitary journey. The physical and mental metamorphosis is borne alone, often in silence. This installation gives form to that solitude, echoing with a heartbeat that once pulsed within me myself, now resonating in the bodies of strangers who step inside my creation. It is an act of radical empathy—and a gentle provocation to remember what women endure, every day, to create life.