2018

handmade paper book 

90cm x 30cm x 40cm

book | installation | object | transformation

questions about my own identity, the process of my formation and a sense of personal 'uniqueness' triggered me to create volume, a 100-spread manuscript composed of reprocessed books on art history, photography and design. i was born in ukraine but received education and became established as an artist in the netherlands. i absorbed the traditions of western art and appropriated them in my practice, leaving my ukrainian past behind. volume is an attempt to look at history from another perspective. the grey, monolithic pages of the book represent the presence of the past in my contemporary artistic practice. by deconstructing the content of the source material which has shaped my artistic personality, i question the role of external force which informs practice. through the act of blending the books into a homogeneous and hierarchy-free mass, i have created new pieces that barely carry any traces of the original information, and thereby engage in a dialogue with the personal references that have influenced my identity. volume is a visual essay about the uneasy task of understanding and processing history. a quest for one’s own identity in the sea of ideas, references and memories.