YOU ARE WELCOME TO MY ROOM UPSTAIRS (2021)
This photographic project forms part of Maryna Semenkova’s ongoing artistic research into memory, lived experience, and the intersection between personal narrative and collective history. Positioned between documentary observation and subjective witnessing, the work approaches photography as a medium capable of holding both factual trace and emotional residue.
Project was born from a simple request for extra space.
Maryna’s quest for additional room led her to a long-forgotten attic, where time seemed to have stood still.
And each item was a full-fledged exhibit and deserved attention. Thus the idea for the exhibition was born.
Maryna took photos of all the objects in this room and posted these photos next to the objects themselves, thereby, as it were, doubling the effect of their perception.
The series investigates how images function as carriers of embodied memory, preserving not only visible reality but also the psychological and affective states embedded within it. Through a restrained visual language, Semenkova constructs a space where individual experience is situated within broader social and historical contexts.
The work was presented in a domestic exhibition format, organized in the artist’s apartment on the occasion of her birthday. The exhibition functioned as an intimate, semi-private gathering where the primary audience consisted of the artist’s close community and friends. This context became an integral part of the work, emphasizing trust, proximity, and the shared negotiation of memory within a lived, non-institutional space.
Within Semenkova’s broader artistic methodology, the photographic image operates as a site of presence rather than representation. The works resist fixed narrative closure, instead creating a contemplative field where viewers encounter traces of lived experience and are invited to reflect on their own relationship to memory, history, and emotional inheritance.
Full documentation available upon request.
MARYNA SEMENKOVA 