Karina Synytsia
‘Stuffiness’, 2024, canvas, acrylic, 210 x 140 cm
‘Diorama’, 2024, canvas, acrylic, 300 x 85 cm
‘Unknown Landscape’, 2024, paper, acrylic, 240 x 310 cm
Karina works with painting, collage, animation and embroidery. In her practice, she focuses on architecture and landscape, which metaphorically embody the state of decline, destruction and exhaustion. In her works, these images become an artistic expression of human emotions provoked by the contemporary world. The artist concentrates on observing what is human and the spaces in which humans exist, exploring the relationship between the universal and the individual. For Karina, this is not passive observation but a dialogue in which she is a listening and empathetic participant. Her desire for compassion has only intensified since the full-scale invasion, as she admits.
In 2014, Karina spent several months under occupation in her hometown of Sievierodonetsk. The changing of flags, a tank outside her window and meeting a friend by a bomb crater are the only memories that have stayed with her from that time. ‘Everything I create now is about the war’, she says. While her works depict fragments of recognisable reality, they do not follow a literal storyline. Karina assembles compositions from images in which experiences, memories, observations and feelings intertwine. She transforms these entanglements into symbolic images, placing them in the landscape that is always a generalised image itself. The space she creates is marked by a sense of exhaustion. Are they the remnants of architecture familiar from distant memories—or perhaps dreams? Is it an empty landscape—abandoned or not yet inhabited? Or is it an intimate space constructed from personal objects? It is difficult to say with certainty whether it represents a state after the end of the world or its beginning. Karina’s art conveys a sense of unsettling fragility and uncertainty, which has become one of the defining conditions of wartime.
