Portfolio

Artistic statement

*soon*

About me

My name is Xena, I am former polar scientist, currently a multidisciplinary artist studying such topics as the connection with the environment, personal and environmental memory, geological time in the life of one, combining scientific and artistic instruments to approach these themes. 

My place of origin is Russia, Ural region, I used to work as a researcher studying climate of the past in Arctic and Antarctic in AARI (Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute), St Petersburg. Due to political situation I had to quit my dissertation that was focused on sea-level change in Antarctic margin during Holocene, for which I was collecting indirect data from Antarctic. Even though 7 years of my career I had Arctic expeditions, I never had a chance to go to Antarctic to collect my own data. 

In 2017 and 2020 I have published artworks both talking about simplification and distance created by scientific methodology. In 2021 I have joined The Terraforming program by Strelka Institute, Moscow. Then, since 2022 I became an immigrant, lived and worked in Colombia, Brazil, Peru, where I has fully shifted my focus on artistic medium while still exploring the topic of relationship between human and the environment, taking into account cultural, political and personal. 
Last year I had two exhibition in Kai Residency, Cusco, where I had a chance to explore the mix of personal and geological, finding ways to express nostalgia and relationship with political reality through working with geological and cartographical imagery — sediment outcrops, scientific data, fossils, maps. Currently working on a project about radical love to the Earth, as a first part of which I have been making a methodological guide to observe the rocks. I am currently focusing on the visual forms that could respond to the methods I am exploring: the combination of careful scientific observation, scientific intuition, personal life experience and artistic imagination.