Title: Making of "Pure For Who"

Medium: Projected video stills, raw meat, string, needle, white underwear, digital iconography, camera, MacBook Air

 Year: 2025

Description:  

Pure For Who  is a brutal yet transcendent performance piece that tears open the myth of purity, sanctity, and maternal sacrifice. Using raw meat as both medium and metaphor, the artist performs a symbolic act of ‘revirginization’—sewing flesh onto the vaginal area of white underwear while projected religious imagery (Madonna and Child) sanctifies, surveils, and contradicts the act.  The juxtaposition is arresting: sacred iconography collides with butchered reality. Flesh once seen as divine offering becomes sewn scar, stitching trauma and ritual into an intimate, bleeding liturgy. The white cotton—symbol of innocence—becomes the altar for a sacrilegious reclamation.  In referencing Madonna imagery, the artist questions not only the imposed ideal of the holy mother but also the centuries-long demand for women to be both vessels and virgins, sacred yet consumable. Here, meat is not food—it is memory, wound, proof.  This work does not ask to be palatable. It demands witnessing.

Medium:  Performance video, spoken word, eggs, plastic wrap

Year: 2023

Description: 

In Piano Queen, the artist revisits a marriage formed in hope — a promise of permanence, of family, of “forever.” But when the pandemic struck and the walls closed in, so did the illusion. What had once been space — softened by distance and travel — became confinement. The lockdown did not just seal a house, it unsealed a truth: this union was not made for mutual becoming. It was built for breeding. Seated on the shore, wrapped in plastic and perched atop fragile eggs, the artist performs the role her former husband cast her in: an incubator. He said it out loud. And the world had always whispered it. The beach becomes her altar, her prison, her witness. The eggs scatter across the sand like discarded futures — not broken, but laid bare. They are her offering, and her refusal. Suffocating under plastic wrap and patriarchal expectations, the Piano Queen does not sing. She seethes. This is not a lament. It’s a resurrection. In this haunting tableau, motherhood is not erased, but reclaimed — not as identity, but as evidence. Of use. Of survival. Of rage. The plastic is not just suffocation. It’s embalming. Piano Queen is a requiem for the fantasy of the nuclear family — and a scream for every woman who was told to sit still and hatch.

Medium: Performance video, spoken word, sculptural installation Year: 2025

Description:  

Holy Playthings is a ritual of unmaking—part exorcism, part funeral, part rebellion.  Set in a forest, the artist constructs her own crucifix from raw wood and nails discarded teddy bears to it, their bodies soaked in black spray paint. The act is not nostalgic—it’s surgical. Brutal. Sacred.  Through spoken word and performance, Orlova unearths the trauma of post-Soviet girlhood, where toys turned into trade and innocence was drowned—literally, as remembered through a neighbor’s act of drowning kittens. Here, she repeats the ritual with new meaning: a baptism not into purity, but into power.  This is not a plea. It is a reckoning.

Medium: Performance video, acrylic paint, latex balloons, plastic, wood, breath

Year: 2023

Description: 

I start painted white—pure, untouched, like someone trying to be good. I’m locked in a clear box. I begin to blow up black balloons, one by one, filling the space until there’s no air left for me.  Each balloon holds a negative emotion I didn’t know how to express—grief, rage, shame. I filled the box with all the feelings I was too scared to feel.  Eventually, I can’t breathe. So I start popping them. But each balloon bursts black paint—coating my body in what I tried to hide. I begin to paint myself with it playfully, almost like a child, unaware of the darkness I’m covering myself in. I think I’m decorating. But I’m dissolving.  Soon I’m sitting in a box covered in black paint. No balloons left. Just mess, silence, sadness. I look around and see what I’ve become inside what I built.  Then I rip open the plastic. And I crawl out.  Not healed. But free.