Soviet Nostalgia
13ft x 7ft
Single-channel video, oil painting
Music by Sergei Nikitin
2025
When the bombs first exploded in Ukraine over a year ago, I was immediately heartbroken at the death and destruction taking place in my homeland. I didn’t volunteer my sorrow at every opportunity, however, because it felt as though I had no right, having left Kyiv with my immediate family when I was only four years old. This video attempts to weave together the complex feelings I hold towards my country of birth – simultaneously Kyiv, Ukraine, but also the former Soviet Union. It’s where I’m from, but no longer my home.
Less about my specific experience, the video collage explores static memory, nostalgia, and the connection to a particular place at a particular moment in time. Time froze in Ukraine for me when we left, but now that it’s in the spotlight, I’m being forced to acknowledge that not only is that version gone, but the country is being ripped apart altogether. My connection to the Soviet Union is meaningful to me in part because I left half of my family behind when I immigrated to the USA. It’s also where my father, who died when I was still young, spent the majority of his life.
My work highlights the deception of memory by creating a world similar to the one in my memory, using found images from the internet. I intentionally lean into the fiction, turning the world into something like a lucid dream where I ‘walk onto the set’ to adjust and fiddle with the components. Imaginary shadows play on the walls, furniture moves as though I’m editing it live. And just as my scene begins to come together, it disintegrates as quickly into the reality of what is.
Personal artifacts and symbolism are sprinkled throughout the work. The painting I hang in the video is of my young father, and the real one will be hangs on the wall, the projection fitted around it.The soundtrack is in Russian (the language I grew up with), performed by Sergei Nikitin – the very first music I consciously remember enjoying as a young child in Ukraine. The red phone was a gift from the grandmother I barely knew back in Kyiv, and I use it as a symbol for the direct line that supposedly exists between the US and Russia in case of emergency (hello? nobody on the other line). The fireworks symbolize Russian missiles (fireworks would also go off most summer evenings by the Dnepr).