Familiar reality as a stage set.

I was born and grew up in Sergiyev Posad; I now live in Moscow. I work in photography and mixed media.

Since childhood I have felt a certain gap between my inner world and reality — the sense that everything around exists only beyond the familiar never leaves me.

I work so that familiar reality feels like a set. The city pretends to be smooth and whole, moves at an even pace, without glitches. In that smoothness I look for what broke out of it and therefore stayed alive. I hit it with a sharp flash, and it becomes real while everything else recedes into the backdrop.

I work at the intersection of analogue and digital photography, collage, and object experiments. My tools: overexposure, grain, prints on tracing paper, coloured tape, layering, silhouette, digital glitch.

Sometimes I deform the image on purpose, because for me a glitch is not a flaw but a place where the machine discovers life in itself: the picture breaks, stops pretending to be a window into reality, and because of that becomes more alive. Grain, tracing paper, and tape give a cold, dense texture — matter without warmth. All these techniques work like flash: mechanically, evenly, indifferent to what they land on.

I use flash as the basis of everything I do. It falls on everything the same way, without discrimination: it highlights, tears an object from the background. Light decorates nothing. It works mechanically and evenly, indifferent to what it lands on. Because of this, space becomes unnatural and alien. Thanks to it we look differently.

Under this light the lifeless begins to live while nobody is watching. An object gains character and gesture, interrupted exactly in the second when I notice it. A person, on the contrary, is bleached out and loses their face, remains a silhouette, a form without a name. One comes alive, the other becomes a thing, and in the frame there is no longer any difference between them.

I don't talk about detachment — I lead into it. The viewer becomes a witness who wasn't invited here. They are a little out of place, in a cold, uncomfortable world. This world repels and draws you to look at it at the same time. Without such a gaze the familiar would have grown tiresome and stayed unnoticed.