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KIRA USATENKO
contemporary artist from Moscow
| ARTIST STATEMENT Мy artistic practice is based on a state that exists between wakefulness and dreaming — a space where time feels non-linear and meanings form a single, multi-layered field. Since childhood, I have had vivid, hyper-realistic dreams that often come true, and since then, sleep has become a valuable way for me to explore the part of myself that many people call the soul. I treat dreams as a method: seeing symbols, “accidents,” and strange details within ordinary things. As an artist, I explore how images (as well as objects and performances) can act as portals, altering our sense of time, disrupting linearity, and revealing what is usually hidden behind logic or boredom. My practice encompasses painting, analog photography, free movement, and poetry. Each medium allows me to explore the same phenomenon: how the invisible structure of one's own experience—the hidden, the unconscious, the strange — becomes manifested and domesticated. |
KIRA
Contemporary artist
I’ve been told I shouldn’t call myself an artist or an art therapist, since I never studied fine arts in the academic sense. But growing up in a family of artists in St. Petersburg gave me a different kind of education — one rooted in intuition rather than technique.
My works are not “correct” in the academic way, and I embrace that. To me, this imperfection is precisely what makes my voice belong to the 21st century: a time that values raw creativity over strict logic.
Workshop Schedule
KIRA USATENKO / CV
/ABOUT
/EDUCATION
/EXCIBITIONS
/EDUCATION
/EXCIBITIONS
b. 2000, Russia, currently lives and works in Saint-P.
English linguistics, Pedagogical Herzen State University, Saint-P. 2021
Liberal Arts [specialization: cinema and new media] St. Petersburg State University, 2023 School of Documentary and Art Photography "Fotografika", 2022
Online exhibition of documentary photographs, 2020 Group exhibition at Union Art festival, Moscow, 2025 Joint exhibition in Gorky Park, 2025
English linguistics, Pedagogical Herzen State University, Saint-P. 2021
Liberal Arts [specialization: cinema and new media] St. Petersburg State University, 2023 School of Documentary and Art Photography "Fotografika", 2022
Online exhibition of documentary photographs, 2020 Group exhibition at Union Art festival, Moscow, 2025 Joint exhibition in Gorky Park, 2025
Documentary & portrait
Photography
Film is my love, my obsession, the passion that shaped me into the artist I am today. It opened for me the drama of a black-and-white world — only to make me hunger for color even more
Sketches / Pastels
sketches
I began to let my hand wander across the page when I entered personal therapy. At the time, I thought I was just sketching my emotions, unaware that it would eventually bloom into my own genre of emotional drawings.
Explore Our Features
POETRY
As a child, my favorite thing was eavesdropping from my bedroom—lying there, cozy and tucked in, in the dark—listening to the grown-ups talk in the kitchen.
I was lucky. I grew up in the early 2000s, a time when kitchen conversations could easily be heavy or dull… yet somehow, I was lucky:
My parents were a little not out of this world themselves, so after my mom had put me to bed, my dad would soothe her to sleep with Brodsky’s poems.
"There floats in an abiding gloom..."
That’s how my unconscious affection for poetry began—like a secret act of love, something “only for adults.”
I was lucky. I grew up in the early 2000s, a time when kitchen conversations could easily be heavy or dull… yet somehow, I was lucky:
My parents were a little not out of this world themselves, so after my mom had put me to bed, my dad would soothe her to sleep with Brodsky’s poems.
"There floats in an abiding gloom..."
That’s how my unconscious affection for poetry began—like a secret act of love, something “only for adults.”
Vagina with a face, 2025
Acrylic, canvas, 70 х 90 cm ( 27 х 35 inch)
This painting is the first in a series of works with unconscious images that I found written in my notebook in the morning.
For more than 8 years, I wake up every night as if someone had abruptly woken me up.
I write down any thought that comes to me at that moment (or a dream if I had one) and fall asleep peacefully.
In the morning, I never remember how I woke up but I always find a note in my notebook. Something like “draw a vagina with a face”.
Mascarade of emotions, 2025
Acrylic, canvas, 70 х 90 cm ( 27 х 35 inch)
This work is also from the series of nocturnal images, but this time reimagined in the context of my second area of work: art therapy. The image of the dead dolphin is like all the unexpressed feelings that lack air. The Casanova mask is like brutality or seductiveness hiding vulnerability. And the heart is like reason, intuition, and a deep knowledge of one's nature.
Art is being jacked!
Documentary research multimedia project
This is a documentary-research project in which artists place works of art at different points of Moscow and St. Petersburg (later, possibly - other cities), capturing the process by hidden cameras. We observe how long does it take for an object to disappear; who takes it; how a person interacts with art; what does it mean when the work remains intact. The project explores the vulnerability of art in the city and the social motivations of people.
ORDER PAINTING
A painting for your intérieur
Size up to 100 x 150
*or order an existing painting
Size up to 100 x 150
*or order an existing painting
Follow me on Telegram
and Instagram
Контактная информация:
Усатенко Кира Сергеевна
ИНН 781011185122
Телефон: 89118198720
Email: Kira.usatenko@gmail.com
