STOLEN CHILDHOOD. 2022
installation

War is always a stolen childhood. Loss of home, support, parents, favorite toys... Loss of future bright memories. The very stable sense of love and security that is laid down in childhood is undermined. Anyone who has seen explosions and death will always remember it. Even a short war kills for a long time.
The Stolen Childhood Project was created in February-March 2022. I left Russia because I could not accept what was happening there. I couldn't keep silent either, and it became dangerous to speak. I packed my suitcases, selectively throwing in my son's toys. At that moment, a shoe from a doll caught my eye. It was definitely not one of my son's toys. It was just a weird, blue shoe out of nowhere. I leaned over it and realized... and began to cry.

I cried for a long time.

Then I put that shoe in my suitcase, bought a children's art tool - a burnisher and a few more toys and flew to Sri Lanka.
This is where my second home is.
From the scraps of fishing boats and toy scraps I created an installation called Stolen Childhood using burnout techniques. The toys are just an allegory. They represent the images of people with their broken lives and, at the same time, the heartfelt pain of a child whose favorite toy is broken.
I cried a lot while I was working on this installation.
I spent my childhood in Ukraine. Many Ukrainian children's childhoods were forever shattered by terrible events.