My practice explores the expressive limits of screen printing—a mechanical process historically designed for repetition and uniformity. I aim to reinsert aura into the printed image by embracing error, tactility, and material presence. In the age of immaterial, automated image production, I work with friction, physical effort, and failure. This is a kind of mechanical dreaming — a prompt made corporeal through labour.
At the core of my practice is the printing process and material. A simple piece of masking tape on a screen often serves as my starting point — analogous to a prompt in AI image generation. But where AI yields infinite digital outputs, my ‘prompts’ are processed through ink and mesh, altered by squeegee movement, time, and erasure. I hybridise screen printing with traditional painting supports, glazing, offset ink or photo emulsion. Thus, the screen printing table has become my expressive “brush”.
At the core of my practice is the printing process and material. A simple piece of masking tape on a screen often serves as my starting point — a minimal, generative gesture that unfolds through mechanical repetition. Unlike the seamless, infinite outputs of digital image production, my process insists on the resistance of matter: ink pushed through mesh, altered by pressure, time, and erasure. I hybridise screen printing with traditional painting supports, glazing, offset ink or photo emulsion. Thus, the screen printing table has become my mechanical expressive “brush”.
My work, however, critiques not only industrial perfectionism but also post-human fantasies of seamless human-machine fusion. Rather than embracing the cyborg ideal, I foreground the vulnerable, sensual body evoked through ruptured surfaces and folds. No two prints emerge identically, reasserting subjectivity and difference within a medium built for duplication.
If there is a critique at play, it is one of production itself. My process reclaims slowness and practice of interruption — of finding subjectivity within the mechanical, and poetry within the repeatable.
In meiner Praxis erforsche ich die ausdrucksstarken Grenzen des Siebdrucks - eines mechanischen Verfahrens, das historisch gesehen auf Wiederholung und Gleichförmigkeit ausgelegt ist. Mein Ziel ist es, dem gedruckten Bild wieder eine Aura zu verleihen, indem ich Fehler, Taktilität und materielle Präsenz in Betracht ziehe. Im Zeitalter der immateriellen, automatisierten Bildproduktion arbeite ich mit Reibung, körperlicher Anstrengung und Scheitern. Dies ist eine Art mechanisches Träumen - eine Aufforderung, die durch Arbeit körperlich wird.
Im Mittelpunkt meiner Arbeit stehen das Druckverfahren und das Material. Ein einfaches Stück Abdeckband auf einem Sieb dient mir oft als Ausgangspunkt - eine minimale, generative Geste, die sich durch mechanische Wiederholung entfaltet. Im Gegensatz zu den nahtlosen, unendlichen Ergebnissen der digitalen Bildproduktion besteht mein Prozess auf dem Widerstand der Materie: Tinte, die durch ein Gewebe gedrückt und durch Druck, Zeit und Auslöschung verändert wird. Ich kombiniere den Siebdruck mit traditionellen Malgründen, Lasuren, Offsetfarben oder Fotoemulsionen. So ist der Siebdrucktisch zu meinem mechanischen „Pinsel“ für den Ausdruck geworden.
Meine Arbeit kritisiert jedoch nicht nur den industriellen Perfektionismus, sondern auch posthumane Fantasien einer nahtlosen Verschmelzung von Mensch und Maschine. Anstatt das Cyborg-Ideal zu umarmen, stelle ich den verletzlichen, sinnlichen Körper in den Vordergrund, der durch zerrissene Oberflächen und Falten hervorgerufen wird. Keine zwei Drucke sind identisch, wodurch Subjektivität und Unterschiedlichkeit in einem Medium, das für die Vervielfältigung gebaut ist, bekräftigt werden.
Wenn hier eine Kritik im Spiel ist, dann die an der Produktion selbst. Mein Prozess fordert die Langsamkeit und die Praxis der Unterbrechung zurück - um Subjektivität im Mechanischen und Poesie im Wiederholbaren zu finden.
I grew up in Russia, within a visual culture deeply shaped by the Soviet legacy. From early on, I was surrounded by images designed to produce belief: socialist realism in museums, Soviet cinema, and endlessly reproduced visual narratives glorifying labour, sacrifice, and political obedience. These images did not simply represent reality — they actively constructed it.
My practice investigates how such systems of visual reproduction operate, and how they might be interrupted from within. I am interested in moments of malfunction, stutter, or vulnerability — points where a seemingly stable system begins to reveal its internal violence, contradictions, or suppressed histories.
After moving to Germany, this inquiry shifted in scale. I could no longer rely on immediate recognition of a shared cultural code. Instead, my focus turned toward the material and medial conditions of reproduction itself. I began to ask where power resides not only in images, but in the technologies and processes that produce them. Screen printing became a central medium in this research: a technique positioned between industry and handwork, mechanical repetition and bodily intervention.
In my process-based works, I deliberately limit myself to the medium’s own mechanisms. I introduce minimal interventions — masking tape, mesh, pressure, time — and allow repetition to generate difference. Control is partially withdrawn; chance, erosion, and duration become active agents. What emerges is not an image in the traditional sense, but a record of friction between system and material, between command and resistance. These abstract works search for subjectivity, sensuality, and even desire inside structures designed for uniformity.
Parallel to this, I work with the iconography of Stalinist socialist realism — images that continue to function as ideological devices within contemporary Russian identity. I approach them not as historical artefacts, but as active carriers of political affect. In my generation, shaped by late Soviet childhood and post-Soviet disillusionment, these images operate like dormant mechanisms: recognisable, powerful, and dangerous. I treat them as a form of contaminated inheritance — visual “containers” of state violence that demand critical deactivation rather than nostalgic preservation.
Across both bodies of work, my interest lies in reproduction as a political and bodily problem: mechanical, ideological, and gendered. As a woman, I am acutely aware that reproduction is never neutral — whether it concerns images, labour, or bodies. My practice resists being reduced to function or utility. Instead, I look for spaces where repetition breaks down, where systems hesitate, and where unexpected, poetic, or critical meanings can surface.
