Lengthwise thread

“The Shared Thread” by Yanina Boldyreva The significant events that we go through often break our personal supports. In order to move on, we need to find new supports in ourselves, our history, important people and places. This is the only way to find new meanings and come to terms with the consequences of the historical rift, the artist believes. In her works, Yanina Boldyreva rethinks the images of the Soviet past and family archives, drawing attention to what was not previously spoken and reflected upon in her family. In this way, Yanina tries to regain her lost subjectivity and show how you can re-face your past in order to take it into the future.

 “The deportation of my relatives from Moldova to Siberia became a turning point in their lives and in many ways determined my own. This event runs through many lives, especially women’s lives, like a shared thread. At the same time, no matter how personal my project is for me, it is inextricably linked with hundreds of thousands of similar stories that I cannot comprehend or feel, but which are visibly and invisibly present in my works and in my life, ” the author says.

 Anton Valkovsky writes: “The grain thread is a key element in the world of sewing and tailoring. These are the main threads that run along the length of the fabric and parallel to its edge. They provide stability and shape to the material.

 In the project of the same name, the artist works with tondo — a form that harmonizes the space of the image, ideally expressing isolation, staticity, centricity, and in a philosophical sense — ideality and harmony. The content of the images, revealing Yanina’s story about the breaks in family history, comes into dissonance with the form, giving a dramatic counterpoint. The work becomes a story about attempts at stitching and continuity, combining disparate and broken connections.

 Collage images interact with each other according to the principle of communicating vessels.

 Elements of authenticity (family photographs and documents) coexist with their ersatz and substitutes, subject and visual prostheses, artistic reconstructions that embody loss and are aimed at filling gaps and yawns of memory (ruined houses, standard carriages, dried and artificial fruits, reconstructive embroidery).

 The glance sliding along the sequence of vague images of the tondo cannot find a point of stability. It resembles the aleatory visual experience of a moving train: the overall picture is assembled from a sequence of blurred and unstable fragments.

The disparate images stitched together will probably never find integrity: the picture of what happened will always be incomplete, patchy and fragmentary. The method at the artist’s disposal is the possibilities of mental reconstruction, allowing one to try on the memory of previous generations in order to appropriate it, work through it and build processes of reconciliation.” 2025