Performances

In this video performance, the artist stitches raw meat into the crotch of her underwear while an image of the Virgin Mary holding the infant Christ is projected directly onto her body. The gesture merges religious iconography with flesh, labor, and injury.

The act draws a parallel between ideals of purity and acts of violence performed in their name. Meat—anonymous, expendable, and consumable—replaces flesh as a stand-in for the body subjected to moral repair. The stitching evokes both wound care and punishment, restoration and control.

By aligning Marian imagery with an act of self-inflicted labor, the work interrogates how religious narratives of purity, sacrifice, and motherhood are inscribed onto female bodies. The question posed by the title remains unresolved: purity, for whom?

In this video performance, the artist stages a symbolic birth on bare rock, delivering a doll’s head from her own body. The act replaces biological life with an object associated with childhood, femininity, and manufactured innocence.

By giving birth to a mass-produced symbol rather than a living body, the work collapses biological reproduction and cultural reproduction into a single gesture. The doll head stands in for ideals that are inherited rather than chosen—beauty, obedience, silence.

Set against an unforgiving natural landscape, the performance rejects sentimentality. There is no spectacle, only effort, exposure, and gravity. Birth is framed not as fulfillment, but as labor through which meaning is passed on.

In Russian Prayer, the artist is shown in a state of private devotion, hands pressed together in candlelight. The gesture is intimate and unresolved—performed alone, without congregation or authority.

The act of prayer is intercut with footage of rats confined in laboratory cages, a snake moving through soil, and rats navigating trash outside. These images move between controlled environments and discarded spaces, between subjects of experiment and subjects of neglect.

Prayer is not presented as redemption or faith fulfilled, but as endurance. The animals mirror the human condition shown on screen: watched, contained, tested, surviving. The work draws a quiet parallel between belief, obedience, and biological management—between what is sanctified and what is expendable.

Rather than offering salvation, the prayer remains unanswered.

In Piano Queen, the artist revisits a marriage formed in hope—a promise of permanence, family, and “forever.” When the pandemic collapsed distance and sealed domestic space, the illusion dissolved. What had once been softened by travel and separation became confinement. The lockdown did not simply close a house; it exposed a structure. This union was not built for mutual becoming. It was built for reproduction.

On the shoreline, the artist appears wrapped in plastic, seated among fragile white eggs. The image stages the role she was assigned and expected to inhabit: incubator. The beach becomes altar, prison, and witness. The eggs scatter across the sand like futures laid bare—not broken, but exposed.

Plastic functions as both suffocation and preservation. The body is sealed, immobilized, and displayed, suspended between life and disposal. The ocean does not intervene. It repeats.

Piano Queen is not a lament but a refusal. Motherhood is neither denied nor idealized; it is presented as evidence—of use, of endurance, of survival under coercion. The work dismantles the fantasy of the nuclear family and confronts the violence embedded in expectations of care, sacrifice, and silence.

In Nutrition of Potato, the artist performs a spoken poem in the redwood forest of Big Sur, using humor, rhythm, and erotic address to deliver nutritional instruction. Filmed nude or minimally clothed, her body operates as both medium and lure. Education is inseparable from seduction.

The work emerges directly from the artist’s early online success, where sex appeal was instrumentalized to teach language and etymology to a mass audience. Here, that strategy is repurposed toward bodily knowledge: digestion, microbes, minerals, aging, and survival. The potato—humble, ancient, and culturally loaded—becomes both subject and symbol.

The poem oscillates between scientific fact and provocation, sincerity and parody. Instructions on resistant starch, solanine toxicity, and micronutrients are delivered alongside flirtation, profanity, and self-aware performance. Health advice becomes spectacle. Authority is destabilized by desire.

Set against the primeval scale of the redwoods, the body appears temporary, exposed, and insistently alive. Nutrition of Potato functions as an early articulation of a recurring concern in the artist’s practice: how knowledge is consumed, who is allowed to teach, and how female bodies are permitted to speak—especially when they refuse to choose between seriousness and pleasure.

In this video performance, the artist lies inside a bathtub wrapped in a black trash bag, struggling to free her body. The domestic space—traditionally associated with cleansing, care, and privacy—becomes a site of containment and disposal.

The trash bag evokes sanitation, erasure, and convenience. The body inside it is alive but treated as refuse: sealed, managed, and difficult to extract. Movement is slow and ineffective. Escape is possible, but not dignified.

The title references municipal waste collection, recasting the artist as a disposable object awaiting removal. The work examines how care, cleanliness, and control collapse into one another—particularly in spaces meant to protect.

Splitting means to divide something. It causes a person to view everything and everyone in black and white, ‘absolute’ terms. Black and white thinking is a trauma response to abuse and abandonment. Seeing and responding to the world in these extremes can leave a person exhausted and emotionally drained. Balloons filled with paint represent negative thoughts. Woman is going through a cycle of idealization and devaluation. By blowing the balloons, she starts seeing herself completely flawed, worthless. Blowing them bigger, started to see her own reflection in a balloon. There are too many balloons in the box, there is no room to breathe. She is suffocating, she needs to break the balloons, break free from negative thoughts. She gets paint all over her body by popping the balloons, she escapes the emotional jail at the end, she breaks free from the dark thoughts, there is hope. In order for her to escape the mental cell, she had to feel the pain, observe it, and then let it go. 

In this video performance, the artist constructs a crucifix in the forest, where the relics of childhood (used teddy bears) are ritually desecrated and nailed to a new godless altar. She wears both softness and war, combining white silk with black leather and military boots, becoming the weapon she was never allowed to be. This piece confronts post-Soviet trauma, religious hypocrisy, the commodification of girlhood, and the burial of innocence beneath a glitter-coated grave.

I dream of sanctuaries, but not untouched ones. My refugia are wounded, scorched, and still breathing. I do not come from a rainforest or an unclaimed shore. I come from a war-shaped nation, a mother-shaped grief, and a lineage of women who survived by swallowing silence. My refugia are not pristine. They are defiant.

This performance asks what it means to build community as an embodied act. I propose that it begins with remembering the children we have forgotten—the ones traded for oil, for ideology, for applause. The ones reduced to data, buried beneath rubble and statistics. This work does not operate through metaphor. It operates through presence and evidence.

Within the performance, fragments of childhood appear as remains:

a beheaded doll suspended from barbed wire,

a scorched teddy bear abandoned in dust,

a kite stitched from trash bags clinging to a broken sky,

a toy gun,

a shattered porcelain Matryoshka—once designed to hold secrets or coins—now emptied of promise.

These objects are not props. They are relics.

Traces of childhood rendered disposable.

If refugia are understood as ecological seed banks—spaces where life persists against collapse—then memory must be the first material preserved. This performance does not retreat into safety. It grieves. It insists. It refuses erasure.

Art carries what politics cannot hold.