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About the work
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Context
My work investigates how memory circulates across objects, species and urban environments — an ecology of memory in which remembrance is not solely a human prerogative but a distributed, interspecies value.
I begin with historical postcards, that once functioned much like today’s Instagram. Mass-produced and widely circulated, they carried personal narratives across continents, only to later disappear in cardboard boxes on flea markets, private attics and antique stores. I treat these postcards like archives of everyday life — fragments that have survived great wars, departures, natural catastrophes and the erosion of private histories. By painting animals and plants onto these images, I interfere with the historical photograph and revise its context. This disruption activates the postcard anew. The animals become mediators of memory: they enter the past as agents who reopen it, reanimating personal and collective traces that might otherwise disappear. This is a form of upcycled memory — bringing forgotten materials and private histories into a new cycle of meaning.
I examine ideas of heritage and explore how memory migrates and regenerates — how it survives not only in humans, but between species, images, and landscapes.
Artist context
About the artist
Xenia Ostrovskaya
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