These are collages based on photographs of the archway on Khreshchatyk - the central street in Kyiv, Ukraine. In the early 50s this street was rebuilt in an opulent and triumphant Stalinist Baroque style.

The images have an oneiric quality to them, as if they were spaces seen in dreams - altered, eerie, both familiar and unfamiliar, anonymous, illogical and bewildering. Some alterations are more explicit and bold and some are subtle and barely noticeable. As a collage method I deconstruct and reconstruct this space, by merging and manipulating its elements.

’ve been finding common rhythms in the photos of sportspeople from archival photographs from 1920-30s USSR, and the post-war Stalinist Baroque architecture on Khreshchatyk street, Kyiv. Make them fit or mimicrate into the architectural environment. Ideologized bodies in the ideologized urban space. In architecture, most of totalitarian states were referencing classical antiquity, but also it could be applied to the cult of the body in both ancient Greece and Rome. Bodies from these photographs are standardized, selected and uniformed. Façade of a building is what those outside see first, same as fit bodies were creating this positive image, ‘façade’ for the international community. Perhaps, this image is way too illustrative, so I’ve decided in the next series to work solely with architectural forms and the absence of humans.