The list of intangible objects that I take with me when I emigrateobject, artbook 2025

Birch people, photobook 

88 pages, thread-sewing binding, cover: cardboard with linocut, 24×17 cm, edition of 250 copies. 

Almaty,  2022

 The project is built on the mockumentary principle, where staged and documentary photos are mixed, forming a world that symbolically reflects today’s reality. The birch man is flesh of the flesh of the birch forest. His life is quiet and mysterious. At first glance, this is an ordinary person, like you and me, but in fact, he went through an evolutionary path from homo sapiens to homo batla (birch man), becoming a creature rooted in forest soil, overgrown with bark, primordial and braces.
More about project on this page 

  2022 pines.mapofmemory.org/book/ (online book project) 

The book was made for the online exhibition “Sandormokh” made by “Memorial” and the Iofe Foundation (St. Petersburg) with the participation of Gulag.Cz.
The exhibition is dedicated to the 25th anniversary of the discovery of the execution ground, where in 1937-38 5130 residents of Karelia and prisoners of BelBaltLag, as well as 1111 prisoners of SLON were killed. “The Last Hours” is emotional and terrible book, specially to make the experiences of people who have long passed away as close and tangible as possible.

The book contains quotes from interrogations of the executioners themselves from the firing squad. Some of them were later also shot, and the book begins with prophetic poems by the talented Ukrainian poet Mykola Zerov. Like many representatives of the Ukrainian Renaissance, he was shot in Sandormokh, the Stalinist system could not forgive Ukrainians either for realizing themselves as a national community, or for preserving and multiplying their culture and language. Even people who welcomed the Soviet power were repressed because of the panic fear of this power before any manifestation of free will. In the Sandarmokh forest alone, about 300 Ukrainian cultural figures were tortured and killed. And it was important for me to tell about this right now.

 Collective Inaction, zine by Samopal Books, 100 copies А5, 28 pages, 2021

More about this project

Teplushka photobook (art-book) 2019

21×14 cm 88 pages in cut form Paper 150 gr.
Printing — digital offset
Binding — hand-sewn, Japanese style.
Cover — cardboard.
Dust jacket made of natural felt with a slit. The book comes with a blade on a string. Contents: Photos, drawings, texts. There have been three print runs so far 2019, 2020 with a total of 105 copies.

 My project consists of a book with photographs and drawings about what to do when your world is inexplicably turned upside down, when white becomes black and perhaps form loses its original content.

This is a journey into a dark forest: a soldier’s dream in a trench, a diary of existential survival and a chronicle of the fight against absurdity. I live in Siberia, and my project combines the terrible camp past of this region with a disturbing present. There must be a refuge somewhere in the midst of it all.

 The project is called “Teplushka”; in Russian it means a ‘heated freight van’. People (mainly soldiers and prisoners) but livestock also were transported this way in Soviet times. Teplushka is a simple house, a primary shelter, while at the same time symbolizing the State`s repression of its own citizens.

 This book is constructed using a French type of bookbinding. Some of the drawings are hidden inside the folds and to view them you will need to cut the pages. By committing this act you are symbolically releasing the hidden meanings of this art-book. 
More about this project on that page

 Sheet happens, photoproject, book 2016  

leporello book, two size. edition 40 copies, print on demand

  This project consists of two sort of pictures, landscape photography and still life (installations). The images follows one after the other, like a dream and reality. It makes a photographic set and should be treated together. This point of view creates the interaction between the visual boundaries of reality and symbolism. For me any urban landscape is like an archaeological site with its cultural layers, which helps me to understand what is happening with the society.

This landscape photos looks like a scenery for social life drama. At the same time the installation in the project is a frozen magical act, casual observer`s dream that is factored out the usual reality. Installations are some extrapolation of the absurd and elusive life which I fix in the documentary part of the project. Desolated snowy landscape for me is a metaphor of sleeping society and inactivity. Therefore, my photos include local “sleeping district”.

All plaster casts presented in my installations is an images of sleeping people and the installations itself was made by using the principle of dreams` structure. They are irrational like all dreams but consist of already known things with implicit connection between them. I think the project is sentimental and critical in both ways, and prone to different interpretation.  
More about  this project 

NSK 2016, 2017

  A book format — 18×20sm, 78 pages, 68 photos, the book is published in Novosibirsk, trial edition 25 copies, in 2017.  

My “NSK” photo-book is based of images I made with the smartphone camera from 2015 to 2017. In some way this book is my photo-diary, and it is the diary of my city too. “NSK” is the reduction from “Novosibirsk"- a popular tag in social nets and widespread Internet designation of my city. The book is of 4 parts. The first part depicts a Victory Day on May 9. Russians celebrate this holiday as day of patriotism and a national unification. The second part is picturing oppositional trends of my society. The photos of the third part metaphorically reflect everyday life out of any events. I wanted to transfer some feeling of stagnation and lethargy arising in my city. The fourth part is a winter photos as a stage in transition to other condition. And here the “New Year” s holidays is just a metaphor of continuous expectation of a miracle, changes amidst the condensing darkness and cold.

 “NSK” book includes critically dyed material. Certainly, it is not the entire life of my city, but it is the points that intriguing me. I purposely used the photos shot with a smartphone because it makes bigger degree of irony and easier to make comparing with a professional camera. Usually I am not eager in representing just ordinary, banal life. I just try to use documentary photography to build my own art dimensions. But in this project I was tied to the documents in the attempt to create the most authentic image of my city and my relationships with it. 

Yanina Boldyreva & Oleksandr Isaienko “The Rupture Zone” 2015
Size 148×210mm, Pages 42Print  b/w, 80 copies, print on demand

The Rupture Zone — it’s a place of military conflict between Russia and Ukraine. However, this is not the only figure, presented in the book. The war and the disintegration, which it causes in the personality and society, its commotion and death, can be found in everyday, non-militarized life. War only reveals them and makes them more bright and prominent, creating a concentration of conflict, aggression and its consequences. Rejecting the documentary in favor of artistic and figurative language, excepting the attributes of time and place, we have focused on understanding and dissection of the mechanism of conflict itself.

Conceptual technique using are processed graphic material, scans, re-captured photos shows our reflections of what is happening — the fragility of being, the illusiveness of the individual, the simulative face of the reality, the plasticity of the human psyche. Building bridges between the archetypical images and experiences on a personal level became the main our task. The rupture zone — the area of our attention, where routine becomes war, and the war becomes the routine, displacement of internal guidelines happens, diving into chaos.
More about this project

Broken space, 2017

Photobook & poster

100 copies

The object contain 29 photos

Print color and w/b

 book composition, text by Vsevolod Kovtun

Lack of light, warmth, and energy for growth. This is the part of life story of the majority of us. 

Immature consciousness cannot be integral. Immature person perceives the world as fragments, and in his turn creates the world made of debris that has never been a piece of a whole.

Similarly, photographer takes out just a piece of space, but the meaning of this action is the opposite.

The fragment is selected to reflect and express the whole, to be the focus of interdependence.

This work is the result of the intention to look at the broken space through an artist’s eyes. It aims either to restore, or to establish the connections, and to inosculate seemingly lifeless fragments not topographically, but in some artistic sense. It’s an attempt to pour life into the cooling space. Maybe, that is why red, almost bloody spots brake through in the final poster. However, the blood here is not a sign of death, but a token of life, and also pain. This is exactly what makes us come back to existence.

Yanina Boldyreva & Oleksandr Isaienko “Index lost” 
Size  215,9 × 279,4 mm. Pages:  80. Print:  color. 40 copies. Print on demand. 2014

This is the story of a certain place, being real and beyond at the same time, since all the evidences — beach, water, sky, fog — tell nothing about it, but can only show its abstractness and generalization.

Detached and defocused view, empty and faded landscapes, being filled with the presence of people with no specific features, don’t expressing themselves, as if they are plunged into lethargy.

Many of our pictures have been taken with the use of glass as a filter in order that intentionally a void the documentary and with draw the image into the plane of the subjective, as well as create a distance between reality and the observer. However, the camera snatched those moments where the landscape and the human are most expressive, and reveal some kind of their state.