Skopje, 23 February 2024 (MIA) – Organized by Europe House Skopje, Italy-based Ukrainian photographer Sofiya Chotyrbok’s “Home Before Dark” exhibition will open at National Gallery’s Mala Stanica at 7 pm.
According to organizers in a press release, the exhibition explores identity through self-portraiture. It was inspired by Chotyrbok’s request for Italian citizenship, which meant giving up her native Ukrainian citizenship. This led the artist to explore “the individual and collective definition of the self at a time when its geographical and temporal foundations are becoming increasingly uncertain.”
“Beginning in February 2020, her series of trips to Ukraine marked a creative process of rediscovering identity and belonging in a post-Soviet context, its borders and definitions now even more vague and complex than ever,” organizers say.
The starting point of the artist’s creative process was the ‘khrushchevka’ Soviet apartment and its interior of “symbolic relics that are simultaneously familiar and foreign.” The resulting artworks combine staged self-portraits and nostalgic collages of tapestries and family photographs, organizers add.
Sofiya Chotyrbok (b. 1991, Zolochiv, Ukraine) is a Ukrainian photographer raised and based in Italy. At the age of 9 she moved to the province of Naples. She attended the course of Photography and Advertising Graphics at the ILAS Italian Academy of Visual Communication and Photography at CFP Bauer in Milan.
She lives in Milan. Her research is focused on the theme of identity in the post-Soviet society and on the archive as intimate and domestic memory, transformed into universal human matter through photography, video and fabric. Her works have been exhibited at major international festivals and museums including Triennale di Milano, Paris Photo Off, Odesa Photo Days, Mana Contemporary (Chicago).
She won a scholarship in 2022 for the narration and research course held by Lina Pallotta at Officine Fotografiche in Rome. Since 2023, she has been an artist-in-residence at VIAFARINI in Milan.
