Sasha Zaitseva

Sasha Zaitseva was born in Ukraine in 1994, she grew up in a Russian-Ukrainian family in the city of Donetsk located on the Russian border. In 2014, during the Ukrainian civil war, she found herself in Paris, where she studied art and witnessed from a distance the upheavals that were tearing her country apart.

She then realized that she is made of two cultures with which she can no longer fully identify herself. It is in this cultural dualism, accompanied by a reflection on belonging to identity that her artistic approach takes root.

Globalized identities / fusion. By merging current consumer objects (plastic toys, charms, etc.) from a globalized culture with those from popular Slavic cultures, Sasha Zaitseva creates hybrid figures that borrow from different universes. She reconstructs a history from objects and their symbols, and questions their components in the formation of identity. Their heterogeneous assemblage underlines the identity conflict of the individual vis-à-vis his community.

Overconsumption / recycling. Sasha Zaitseva accumulates representative objects of the culture of mass to recycle their symbolism alongside everyday objects in the Soviet Union. The gestures of collecting, cutting and unstitching, assembling, embroidering, and re-gluing come in opposition to those of overconsumption. They refer rather to the familiar gestures of her childhood, belonging to a logic of decline, but also a love for DIY, based on what we have on hand to constitute a language.

Womanhood/recreation. Sasha Zaitseva also uses traditional techniques that history and art history have attributed to women, such as embroidery or carpet weaving, an activity reserved for women in Ukraine. Her flamboyant red Ukrainian and Russian embroidery here asserts «girl power», while the fabric sculptures examine the impact of digital on

culture.