Manifesto

They confiscated my family’s land, factories and name, and called them enemies of the people. My mother’s family was driven to Siberia on foot — three months through deep snow and frost. Most of them were killed on the way. Small children were thrown to the dogs in front of their mothers. The guards said the dogs had to eat too. My father spent ten years in prison.

Every one of them was rehabilitated. The state admitted, in writing, that none of it should ever have happened.

So I do not paint to decorate. I paint the things systems want unsaid — money, war, the rules written around a body — and I use the real material: real gold, real currency, real blood.

Each collection takes one subject and refuses to make it comfortable.

She is not planning to pick one thing.

The method

The paintings are made through Trancerealism — the method UNIKEL founded, in which the work is channelled rather than observed into being. Read about the method →

The activism

In 2009 she organized a public protest calling for Lenin’s removal from Red Square. Her work has been auctioned for the Make-A-Wish Foundation, and in 2019 took the MOSAIC Federation top art prize for work against human trafficking. The argument is the same in paint, in sound and in the street.