Gjutarsin toukokuun residenssinäyttelyn taiteilija on Eva Alvor Zaporizhzhiasta, Ukrainasta.
I started working with textiles in the fall of 2022. At that time, blackouts were in Ukraine. We set out for 4-5 hours on dark fall evenings without electricity. My anxiety was off the charts, and my emotional state was heavy. Fine hand embroidery and painstaking work helped me regain my mental balance.
So began my escape from nightmarish reality into the world of dreams and illusions. The sensual and delicate creatures of my fictional worlds are a way of escaping from the daily reality that permeates my soul and body with pain and despair. Existential loneliness from which it is useless to hide, the emptiness that burns out everything alive in the heart. I go to this imaginary world of a dystopian future, where there are no people and the boundless oceans are inhabited by creatures of bizarre nature.
The erotic tenseness of their poses is combined with a subtle, physiologically defenseless sensuality; trap plants conceal aggressive expression and predatory nature.
Thus, the magical melancholy of the garden of childhood fantasies, replaced by reflections on ontological foundations, is revealed in a dark perspective filled with mystical and horrible ghosts. But can escape be salvation if there is no escape from oneself? Vain hopes, and the mask of supposed optimism is an illusion of protection that turns one into a blind man. It is impossible to see that the false path of escape leads to a toxic wasteland into the darkness, where all life dies, where the poisoned, scorched earth consumes the last skeletons of civilization.
Eva Alvor (Olena Myrnychenko) is an artist who lives and works in Zaporizhzhia. She produces acrylic paintings, graphic works in charcoal, textile pieces, embroidery, theatre costumes and site-specific installations. In 2006 she graduated with distinction from the faculty of design at Khmelnytskyi National University. She has worked as a designer at an advertising agency, a 2D graphic artist in the gaming industry in Kyiv and a botanical illustrator. In 2019 she began working on contemporary art projects.
Eva has participated in numerous exhibitions and artists’ residencies, both in Ukraine and abroad. Her work can be found in private collections in Ukraine, Poland, Estonia, the US, Slovenia, Czechia and Germany. Since 2024 she has been collaborating on the project ‘Voices of the Invisible: Art, Marginalisation and Political Resistance in a Socioeconomic Context’, which is supported by the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Berlin.
Eva Alvor on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/eva.alvor/
