Maryna Semenkova is a socially engaged multimedia artist and researcher from Ukraine, based in Berlin.
Her practice works at the intersection of existence, collective memory, and eco-mind feminism thought, using performance, photography, and time-based processes as primary media.

Rooted in the experience of being born and raised within the late Soviet and post-Soviet cultural landscape, Semenkova’s work examines how large political systems imprint themselves onto intimate psychological and behavioral patterns. Through long-term engagement with personal psychological trauma, she developed an artistic methodology that connects individual experience with historical memory. Within this framework, the war between Ukraine and Russia is understood not only as a geopolitical event, but as a rupture that exposes unprocessed historical trauma embedded within societies and state narratives.

Working through performative actions, material interventions, and visual constructions, Semenkova translates invisible emotional and historical residues into spatial and visual form. Her works often create situations of witnessing, where personal history becomes a lens through which collective histories can be confronted.

Her work is grounded in the understanding that the body functions as an archive, pain produces memory, and the psyche becomes the stage where both continue to exist and replay over time.

Trained as a lawyer and engaged in meditation and psychotherapy since 2008, Semenkova approaches artistic work as a form of structural inquiry. Living in India for three years shaped her long-term interest in how women construct freedom across cultural systems.

Since leaving Ukraine after the full-scale invasion in 2022, her work increasingly addresses exile, inherited memory, and the persistence of historical structures within the present.

Her practice proposes art as a site of excavation — where memory, body, and political history are interwoven — and as a space for articulating silenced or historically suppressed experiences.