Foliage, 2026. Installation view at the xpon-art gallery.
Found objects, prints on A4 office paper.

The educational film slide found in the Exclusion Zone in Chernobyl (the Ukrainian spelling: Chornobyl), Ukraine after the catastrophe with the words "the leafy plants have wilted and drooped", becomes a warning and a lesson from the past.
In the installation, the film of foliage is enlarged and reconstructed from many ordinary A4 sheets of paper, arranged like a puzzle. This shift in scale is tangible — what was once a small educational image becomes a field or territory. The use of office paper pulls the work toward the language of everyday bureaucracy: reports, forms, “working hours,” and so on, but not real action.

After the 1986 accident, plants were the first surface to receive direct fallout. The artist's older brother, who was a liquidator of the Chernobyl power plant catastrophe, served at that time in the area of the Red Forest in the Exclusion Zone, one of the most contaminated areas in the world today. In the first phase, radioiodine passed quickly from grass to animals and then to milk, one of the main routes by which children received a dose to the thyroid. Milk is the first free food that a newborn receives. As the Soviet form of care milk was distributed for free in schools and harmful industries, and the artist's mother received the daily free liter for her work in a chemical laboratory. After Chernobyl, milk became the opposite, carrying fallout through grass, cows, school bottles and children's bodies, while silence and propaganda kept the danger invisible. Prussian blue, the deep blue pigment used in art (Fe [Fe(CN).]) and also an antidote for caesium-137, becomes a way to reveal the consequences.