WHAT I FOUND IN THE STEPPE

2024

A solo exhibition project by Ulyana Agban

A hidden, irrational inner landscape — a fragment torn from the fabric of memory, woven from images of home and ancestry; a place where grief finds consolation and, at the same time, an open wound that reactivates the past, allowing memory to generate an infinite number of alternative narratives. This process recalls the ocean's projections in Stanisław Lem's Solaris. Ulyana Agban calls this place the Steppe, connecting this metaphysical landscape to her father's homeland — the physical land of the Republic of Tuva, a historical, cultural, and geographical foundation of her artistic practice.

People have an innate tendency to shape this personal territory by recreating the familiarity of everyday life, populating new landscapes with the elusive ghosts of what is cherished and desperately held onto in the present. The ordinary, the simple, the mundane — once placed within this land — becomes a complex system of signs through which we communicate with ourselves and with others, like notches carved along an endless journey: neither backward nor forward, but toward this shadowed place that lies beyond conventional systems of orientation.

"I build this place carefully, like a home," Ulyana explains, "on the one hand, to hide within it; on the other, to show those who come why I am here and why there is nothing unnecessary here. Here are my horses, here are my stones, here is what I found in the steppe."

Endlessly solitary and vulnerable, predatory and untamed, piercingly alive — Ulyana approaches the personal space of the Steppe with the attentiveness of a documentarian. And this raises a question: is what we find in the steppe always only what we ourselves have left behind (and built), or is it also what has been left there for us? Is what the Steppe gives us truly what we were searching for?

Curator: Olya Makhno

Artist: Ulyana Agban

Special thanks to Dinar Uvarov for his support in the realization of the exhibition.

The project was presented at Rostokino Gallery, 30 May – 30 June 2024.