My practice investigates how political violence and displacement inscribe themselves into material surfaces—where the body becomes an archive and painting functions as a site of evidence. Working under the pseudonym Cemra (“darkness” in Belarusian), I approach the canvas not as an image-field but as a vulnerable, responsive body that can bear traces, scars, and memory.

I deconstruct the traditional pictorial plane by building an “epidermis” through layers of plaster bandages, resin, oil paint, and varnish. Bandaging is both a procedure and a structure: it compresses, protects, exposes, and records. The surface becomes a wound-like topology—stitched, sealed, ruptured—registering the pressures of its time rather than illustrating them.

After being forced to leave Belarus in 2022 due to political pressure, questions of testimony and absence became central to my work. I treat rupture, amputation, and void not as metaphors, but as material conditions: a cut in the canvas, a scarred skin, an unavailable body. In works such as Amputation of Roots, absence operates as a form of presence—an index of what has been removed, censored, or made unreachable.

My projects invite a physically attentive encounter. They ask the viewer to move from looking at an object to confronting a witness: a surface that resists closure, holds contradictions, and insists on proximity. In this space, the work does not “heal” trauma; it gives it form, duration, and legibility—so that what is often silenced can be carried, shared, and remembered.