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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.