Varya Kozhevnikova

My name is Varya Kozhevnikova, I'm an artist working with photography. In my work, I combine documentary and performative approaches, balancing between fact and fiction, direction and improvisation. I explore the female nature, focusing on such aspects as physicality, mental processes and their consequences, especially perfectionism, obsession and overthinking. I take my personal
experience as a starting point and compare it with the collective one. That way, the photography's subject becomes an explorer's subject and an opportunity to engage with oneself through the other. The presence of other, my own existence in the projects, the interaction of our experiences: these are the central methods in my work to create different relations between the artist, the model
and the viewer. The body is the basic visual language for creating this relationship. I develop the posing conditions for the models after comprehending person's experience. Finally, the model's poses is either staged or improvised. Another performative aspect of the work lays in the selection and sequencing of images. I often combine photos to achieve the effect of animation or comparison.
I also create collages from photographs of one scene to prolong the action and invite the viewer to remain in the episode.