About Unicorn Blood

Overview
Some stories refuse to remain in the past. When I spoke with Russians who had recently left their country, I kept hearing echoes of another century. Different people, different governments, different borders - yet always the same questions: What do you take with you when you leave? What remains of home when you can no longer return? How long can a person live between belonging and exile?
These paintings bring together two moments in time, with a hundred years between them. The voices in the foreground belong to people experiencing displacement today. Behind them are figures that seem trapped in a state of suspension, caught between departure and arrival, memory and uncertainty. Further in the background, almost like a persistent shadow, fragments appear from the exile of Russian intellectuals in the 1920s.

The works are not about a history repeating itself exactly. They are about recurring patterns of exclusion, fear, loss and survival. About how political decisions become personal tragedies. About people who feel unwanted in the country they left and never fully accepted in the countries that receive them.

Exile is often described through statistics, documents and borders. But its reality is much quieter: an unanswered phone call, a language you no longer hear every day, a familiar street that now exists only in memory, the strange feeling of becoming a stranger from one day to the next.

Unicorn Blood is an attempt to bring these experiences together across time. Not as historical proof, but as human stories. Stories that keep returning, long after we think they belong to the past.