/ART/

about the artist: 

Yulia Adelova (b. 1988, Tynda, Russia) is a Moscow-based photographer and visual artist whose practice exists at the intersection of photography, performative gesture, and subtle spatial intervention. With a background in journalism, graphic design, and contemporary photography, she has developed a distinctive language that transforms the ordinary into the quietly unsettling.

Adelova studied journalism and philology at the University of the Russian Academy of Education and art and graphics at Moscow State University for the Humanities, later completing a graphic design program at the British Higher School of Art and Design. Her visual sensitivity was further sharpened through intensive studies in contemporary photography first with Ivan Knyazev at Photoplay (2020–2021), and then through experimental practice at DocDocDoc school (2021–2022). This multidisciplinary education allows her to approach photography not merely as documentation, but as a tool for conceptual transformation.

At the core of her work lies an acute attention to the invisible tensions between body, object, and environment. Adelova constructs scenes in which familiar structures, architectural, social, or psychological, begin to shift, crack, or reveal their inherent fragility. Through carefully staged interventions, playful disruptions, and precise observation of everyday spaces, she uncovers the absurdity, vulnerability, and unexpected poetry hidden within the banal. Her images often blur the line between recording reality and altering it: a body changes the geometry of a room, a gesture exposes the instability of an interior, and the camera becomes both witness and accomplice in a quiet metamorphosis.

Whether working with performative actions or meticulously composed still lifes, Adelova consistently explores how physical presence reshapes space and, conversely, how space conditions our emotional and mental states. Her photographs do not scream, they whisper about collapse, about the delicate balance that holds our constructed realities together, and about the moment when that balance begins to slip.

Yulia Adelova’s works have been shown in group exhibitions in Moscow and Kaliningrad. Currently travelling around the world, continuing to investigate the fragile architecture of the everyday through the medium of contemporary photography.

Text Irina Rusinovich @_rusinovich
Van der Mark’s paintings begin with the kind of looking that most people do without registering the observation of bodies in commercial space, of how identity is continuously negotiated through appearance, gesture, and the particular quality of presence someone brings to a room. Fashion shows, boutiques, cafés, urban interiors: environments engineered around desire and self-presentation, which van der Mark treats not as symbols to be critiqued but as the actual terrain her figures move through, with full awareness of what that terrain demands and what they choose to give it.
The women in these works occupy their surroundings with a quality that resists easy categorization. They are neither defiant nor compliant, neither performing for an implied audience nor withdrawing from one. What van der Mark captures is something more precise the specific composure of someone who understands the visual systems around her and has decided, on her own terms, how to inhabit them. Fashion operates in this context as it does in life: simultaneously as a language of self-expression and a structure that shapes what can be expressed, a tension the paintings hold without attempting to resolve.
Working in the figurative tradition, van der Mark uses oil paint to insist on presence in a moment that privileges circulation over duration. The deliberateness of the medium is part of the argument each figure demands a quality of attention that the environments she moves through are not necessarily designed to produce. In slowing the image down, van der Mark makes visible what speed tends to flatten: the interiority behind self-presentation, the authorship within appearance.
Belonging to Myself takes its title seriously, without sentiment. Across this body of work, identity is something the figures actively construct rather than passively receive, located not in opposition to the visual culture surrounding them but in a conscious, self-directed relationship with it.

Since ancient times, people have sought to
transcend the ordinary body through dance and adornment.
The act of covering the face and wearing flowers or
feathers seems to carry a folkloric sense of prayer and protection,
as well as a ritualistic quality that allows one to
transform into another kind of being.
I was deeply drawn to the physical expression and
sculptural beauty she has cultivated as a performer,
as well as to her own striking presence. Through this work,
I explored how far these qualities could be translated into the
medium of photography, and how they might coexist
with flowers ̶ collective forms of natural beauty.
The flowers are not placed merely as decoration, but as quiet armor for
her body, carrying with them the memory of plants themselves.

There’s something disarming about Sergey Blokh’s world where realism slowly dissolves into dream logic, and simple, familiar things suddenly start to whisper. His paintings turn everyday objects into carriers of mystery, irony, and emotional charge.
We spoke with Sergey about how magic slips into the mundane, about color as intuition, and about the pleasure of building worlds where consciousness and the subconscious meet halfway.
Your works exist between realism and magic, ordinary things suddenly gain symbolic power. What makes an object “worthy” of entering your painterly space?
The subject or phenomenon I choose must be understandable and recognizable to the viewer. Simple, everyday objects allow the composition to remain clear and “readable.”

BIO
I am a freelance photographer living in Berlin.I completed the prestigious one-year Sputnik Photos Mentoring Program in Warsaw, Poland. My main area of work is documentary photography shifting toward magical realism.

My long term project about polish prisons “Three square meters” have been selected for the 2017 Aperture Summer Open, On Freedom in Aperture Gallery and also received KTR 2017 (prestigious Polish Advertising Contest) nomination for Best Personal Photography Project . 
In 2019 my work was a part of Der Greif Blame the Algorithm 12 issue guest edited by Oliver Chanarin and Adam Broomberg. 
My work was also a part of a group exhibition in the Stadtmuseum München, Germany conceived around Der Grief issue 12 In Munich, Germany.