Ola Yeriemieieva
27.02.2026 –
09.05.2026
l‘image fantôme / Примарний Образ
Opening 27.2. | 19:00
Introduction by Charlotte Uekermann
Ola Yerimieieva (1997, Kyiv, Ukraine) works at the intersection of memory, loss and material traces.
The starting point for her practice is her early experience of the death of close friends. The artist's works revolve around the fear of loss, the re-materialisation of what has already been lost and the attempt to preserve what still exists.
At the centre of this is analogue photography, which she understands less as a means of staging and more as a form of testimony. The sometimes intimate photographs take on the quality of a text: they become proof of existence, of closeness, of a specific moment in space and time.
Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine forms the central and indispensable point of reference in Yerimieieva's work. The album My Family documents the first year of the war and moves thematically between the repetitive alternation of states of emergency and the attempt to maintain a fragile normality. Houses destroyed by war become wounded bodies – also in the artist's watercolour drawings. ‘Spaces that bleed’ become a metaphor for the omnipresent wounds and losses of war.
The exhibition brings together works that are as intimate and personal as they are politically relevant. They document a present in which destruction is omnipresent and at the same time create a sensitive artistic space for remembrance.
Ola Yeriemieieva with Alya Segal
https://secondaryarchive.org 2024
My art is mainly about the fear of loss and an attempt to preserve what has not yet been lost. And if it is lost, I aim to rethink and materialize this loss. In my younger years, I experienced the death of my close friends, and in many ways, it shaped me as an artist.
War is synonymous with loss. I have been lucky not to yet lose my home, my city, my memories. But the short-lasting experience of fleeing my hometown and the fear of not returning have only strengthened the need to record what can be so easily erased1. For now, I have this opportunity.
I work a lot with photography. I do not use it as a tool for constructing images but as a means of testimony. Photography can be synonymous with text.
A significant part of my practice is dedicated to the topic of corporeality. I have worked extensively with male eroticism. This practice borders between the manifestation of love and the search for beauty, and it is an attempt at inner emancipation aimed at changing the gender roles of both artist and model2.
I turn to self-portraits as evidence of my material presence. I imagine most of my works as a story happening after my death, serving as proof of my existence, my friends, and my surroundings. It is a simultaneous escapism into the past and the future, where grief is still or no longer present.
The album My Family is a documentation of the first year of the war. It represents the life of the artistic community and the normalization of life during the war. Evacuation, living in another city, hiding from shelling, parties, and exhibitions. Hervé Guibert wrote that photography has any value only if it captures a certain time and space. This is a statement that accurately describes this work.
After the Russian invasion, I started looking for kinships with other wars, for points of intersection between past memories and present events, especially in my hometown. I think about a world that has never had peace and tranquility. About endless war and suffering. These thoughts are embodied in the work Sleep Well, It Won’t Happen Again. The collision of the grief from different wars in one particular place. The hope for a peaceful future that ends a few meters away. Deaths in the name of the Motherland. Deaths that will never end.
I reflect a lot on the human body, which during the war is the main target of destruction, the target of terror. War on many levels is synonymous with the torture of the body. I started working with this topic in a kind of state of affect that emerged when the aftermath of the Russian occupation of Bucha was made public. In the project Untitled, I depicted bodies that were tortured.
Thoughts about loss and life after loss are embodied in the work We Accepted Death. In it, I express my fear of existence after losing a body part. In the graphic series Sewn People I try to reassemble bodies and bring them back to a conventional norm.
In places of mass murder and violent death, will the deceased be able to regain their bodies and personalities in the form of a tree-body? With these thoughts, I created the work People Who Became Trees.
The full-scale Russian-Ukrainian war has been going on for two years now, and it’s hard to think of it as something separate — as something that never happened and will end someday. In the present and future, I see more responsibilities than opportunities. To continue my work, to document what surrounds me, to create culture in times of its total destruction.