North Caucasus

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This series of paintings developed out of a growing interest in how landscapes carry layered histories — especially in politically charged, culturally complex regions. I travelled through Dagestan and Chechnya in December 2017 with a Dagestani artist and photographer, exploring the terrain of the so-called “Literary Caucasus,” a region romanticised and mythologised by 19th-century Russian writers like Pushkin, Lermontov, and Tolstoy.

The project was shaped by an awareness of how those writers projected imperial narratives onto the land — casting it as wild, beautiful, and subordinate. I was interested in how those legacies still echo in the present, and how painting might hold traces of both the historical and the contemporary. Several works allude to figures such as Imam Shamil and moments like the siege of Gimry, or quietly reference more recent strategies of state power.

Rather than illustrating these events directly, the paintings function as quiet reflections on landscape, memory, and cultural pressure — early experiments in a practice that has become focused on painting as a form of slow observation in politically loaded spaces