Artist Statement — VARVARA

Varvara (b. 2001, Moscow) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice unfolds at the intersection of decolonial thought, folklore, and embodied ritual. Living between Italy and the United Kingdom since adolescence, she works from a position of permanent displacement—linguistic, cultural, and temporal—treating nomadism not as loss but as a critical method. Her work inhabits multiple histories simultaneously while refusing the authority of any singular narrative.

At the core of Varvara’s practice is a process of decolonial unlearning. She approaches decolonisation not as spectacle or rupture, but as a slow, intimate excavation: the careful dismantling of imperial myths, romanticised folklore, and inherited models of identity shaped by state power. What emerges in their place are fragile, unresolved forms—identities that resist coherence and refuse to be stabilised.

Folklore functions in her work not as nostalgia, but as survival technology. Drawing on fragments of pre-Christian Slavic, Finno-Ugric, and steppe-based ritual traditions, Varvara treats folklore as a living, adaptive system developed long before borders or nations existed. Harvest effigies, faceless protective spirits, healing chants, and liminal costumes appear as tools for endurance rather than symbols of origin. Reclaimed from nationalist appropriation, folklore becomes a quiet form of resistance—communal, mutable, and future-facing.

Her visual language is built through masks, effigies, large-scale figures, and durational performances staged in fields, quarries, coastlines, and abandoned industrial sites. Masks are sculpted from wax, paper pulp, earth, reeds, clay, and salvaged materials gathered along her migration routes. For Varvara, the mask is not concealment but transformation: a temporary homeland, a portable identity that cannot be bordered, owned, or colonised. Monumental figures—often three to five metres tall—appear briefly within landscapes as ephemeral monuments to suppressed or forgotten histories.

Performance operates as ritual rather than spectacle. Actions are slow, deliberate, and frequently wordless: walking long distances, carrying fragile objects, melting masks, weaving and unweaving materials, covering and uncovering the face. Filmed in grainy monochrome, these works suspend time, producing a sense of being both ancient and speculative. Her figures are neither ancestors nor descendants, but presences that exist outside official history—inhabiting the gap between past and future.

Varvara’s practice asks what remains of the self once the nation-state is stripped away. How does a body carry memory when history becomes contested territory? What rituals return when belonging collapses? By positioning the mask as sovereign territory and folklore as a communal technology of care, her work proposes alternative forms of identity grounded in tenderness, endurance, and refusal. In an era of fixed borders and inherited narratives, her art gestures toward identities that remain unresolved—yet radically alive.