Pavla Nikitina

Nikitina’s new work is a sculpture depicting four kids playing hide-and-seek. Three of them are covering their eyes with their hands and facing the wall, while the fourth kid, a little boy, is discreetly peeping at the viewer. These kids are Ukrainians who were forced to flee their homes after the full-scale war broke out, and now live in Brno, Czech Republic. They are labelled as refugees, but they refuse to call themselves that and rather perceive the whole situation as a sort of a temporary game where they have to keep counting months and wait to come back to Ukraine. In this game, they are not hiding but seeking.

After February 24th, Nikitina co-lead creative workshops in Brno helping Ukrainian kids to distract themselves from the tragic events and adapt to the new place of stay. These classes eventually proved therapeutic not only for the children but for the artist herself, as she learnt how to stay sane by keeping optimistic just as kids do, light-heartedly and sometimes a bit naïvely.

Nikitina creates her photopolymer sculptures by 3D scanning and printing. Her artistic practice includes making 3D reportages, documenting and archiving certain current events to make objects that could become social documents in the future. Instead of capturing popular public figures, the artist focuses on new personalities, new actors of our reality, such as soldiers in rehabilitation or, like in this case, kids. The whole idea behind her sculptures is not to glorify a hero, but rather to thank her chosen muses for giving hope and inspiring others to hold on and keep believing in the best even in the darkest times.