Varvara Uhlik:Sanatorium Crimea

Varvara Uhlik’s practice examines post-Soviet identity, cultural memory and the enduring effects of Russian imperialism, drawing on her personal history and the landscapes of eastern Ukraine. Working across photography, video, sculpture and installation, Uhlik incorporates family archives, found imagery and forms associated with Soviet domestic and industrial life, tracing how political histories become embedded within everyday objects and experience, and how they persist across generations. Increasingly mediated through family photographs, online imagery and digital fragments, her connection to formative people and places informs works that consider displacement, absence and the fragile nature of memory. Moving between personal recollection and collective history, Uhlik examines the impulse to preserve what has become inaccessible and the ways in which memory is reconstructed over time.

Uhlik was born in Dnipro, Ukraine, in 1997, and received an MFA in Fine Art: Media from the Slade School of Fine Art, London, in 2025. She received the Royal Society of Sculptors’ Gilbert Bayes Award and was selected for New Contemporaries 2025-26, before being named a Foam Talent Runner-up and nominated as a FUTURES Photography Talent in 2026. Selected solo exhibitions include Lyoh, The Door, Palmer Gallery, London (2025), and Sonechko, Yak Ty?, Artphilein Foundation, Lugano (2026). Selected group exhibitions include Gen Z. Shaping a New Gaze, Photo Élysée, Lausanne (2025); The Flesh of Space, The Sunday Painter, London (2025); New Contemporaries, South London Gallery, London (2026) and Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, Middlesbrough (2026); and Gen Z. Shaping a New Gaze, Fotografie Forum Frankfurt, Frankfurt (2026). Uhlik currently lives and works in London.