Portrait of Great grandfather Sodnom Dorzhi with his mother, taken in the 1930s in remembrance of his younger sister Cyrilla, who succumbed to the hunger caused by Soviet Collectivisation.
Self-Portrait with my Brother, 2022.
Mother's archive passport photos, with hand-drawn modifications.
Self-Portrait, posing as Trans-Baikal Metis: female, 23 years old, 3rd Generation.
Trans-Baikal Female Metis women, age 28, 4th and 6th generation, E Shurkin, 1931. Kunstkamera Museum Archive.
Dissected Identities, Self-Portrait Triptych, 2024.
Vanishing, 2022.
Family Line, 2022.
Coffin Bearers, 2022.
Ovoo Pole, 2023.
Grounded in Mongolian shamanistic tradition, the title refers to the ritual Ovoo (or Obo in Buryat) – a sacred totem pole marking spiritually significant land. These structures, serving as conduits to the spiritual realm, embody the Buryat people's post-nomadic worldview in Siberia. Through this project, I seek to explore how the presence of Ovoos in today's landscape marks Indigenous presence, especially within a post-colonial context. The project combines photography, archival research and personal history to challenge conventional historical narratives and reassert Indigenous identity.
The project began as a personal investigation into my maternal Buryat heritage, where I sought to integrate familial and state archives with photographic reenactment and self-portraiture. By mimicking ethnographic research, I aim to recontextualise Indigenous Siberians' complex and often hidden history. Focusing on the early 1930s – a period during Soviet collectivisation that devastated Indigenous identities in North and Central Asia – the work examines how historical narratives are shaped, contested and often erased within the post-colonial framework.
My research began with the discovery of a demolished Buddhist monastery, where one of my ancestors – a Buddhist lama – served before being repressed and sent to a Soviet work camp. His survival and eventual return to Buryatia sparked an effort to salvage the region's Buddhist cultural heritage. This personal discovery in the local archive in Buryatia in 2023 made me question the fragile positioning of Indigenous history, prompting me to use photography to intervene in such a process. To engage with this erasure, I began creating self-portraits that mimic ethnographic photos from family records and institutional archives, such as those in the Kunstkamera Museum. By juxtaposing these images with historical photographs, I aim to open a conversation about the contested nature of history and reverse the alienating gaze of otherness.