About
I look at our experience and documentation of ecological relationships in cultural memory. My work uses photo, video, and archival processes to replicate our desire for preservation and displacement through destruction or loss. This is combined with my interest in collections, art spaces and libraries as these places present the archive as an event, something to be engaged with and in turn contribute to its survival. I explore ‘nature’ at the edges and boarders of places, such as towns, agricultural fields, and riversides. The images often come from familiar places in Ukraine, whether physically here or in memory.
I am interested in the concept of nature as artifice by presenting these places through objects such as film slide projectors, scanners, old cam-corders, box TV screens, and collage into physical installations. They are often synced, with visual and mechanical rhythms looping, images of plants layered through these old and new technologies.
My recent cultural research focuses on short form moving image making in the context of an artist’s practice in and around Ukraine after 2022. I am especially interested in how landscapes and ecology in the past, present, and future are depicted in the aftermath of Soviet’s imperial ambitions and Russia’s current aggression.
Sofiya Marynyak 