Darya Siamchuk (b. 1990, Grodno), known as Cemra (“darkness” in Belarusian), treats the painting itself not as a surface, but as a living body with its own unique form. She builds an “epidermis” from plaster bandages, resin, oil, and varnish — a layered skin that physically registers compression and human experience.

Working with rupture and voids as material conditions, she focuses on surfaces that store what is removed or silenced. Since her displacement from Belarus in 2022, political violence has become a central theme, evolving her practice into a “collective epidermis.” Her works do not illustrate pain but embody it, preserving the shared memory of what cannot be expressed in words. Based in Warsaw.