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The sense of belonging to a particular country, the attachment to one’s national identity, the national idea and national symbols are never stronger than in times when countries are in conflict with each other. After the Revolution of Dignity in 2014, followed by russia’s occupation of Eastern Ukraine and the now fully escalated war, the patriotism of the Ukrainian people grew enormously. In her work Olga Permiakova not only documents the increasing number of everyday objects coloured in the Ukrainian national colours of Capri Blue and Traffic Yellow, but also condenses this patriotic symbolism into a framework of identity, hope and cohesion in her photographic work.
Exhibition Documentation: Eight Cubic Meters (Amsterdam, 2020)
Яeclaim Award (Cologne, 2022)
In this project, Olga Permiakova explored the experiences of women serving as soldiers in the Joint Forces Operation in Eastern Ukraine. Through interviews, she investigated their position within the predominantly male Ukrainian army, examining their challenges from a female perspective. Key responses from these conversations were transformed into stereograms—hidden messages embedded within images—created using photographs the women had recently shared on social media.
At the time, Permiakova found that the infrastructure of the Armed Forces of Ukraine was designed almost exclusively for men, with little consideration for the needs of female soldiers. This lack of recognition led her to draw a parallel between their position and the concept of camouflage. Camouflage serves a dual purpose: it allows a soldier to disappear from an enemy’s view while simultaneously reinforcing a societal archetype of what a soldier should look like.
In Camouflage, Permiakova composed portraits of these women in a way that merged them with the landscape, creating a visual illusion that reflected their cultural and social invisibility. Through this work, she aimed to challenge perceptions of identity, visibility, and belonging within a system that, at the time, often overlooked them.
Graduation Show, Gerrit Rietveld Academy (Amsterdam, 2018)
A child who travelled all around the USSR
"...I was dancing at Medeo gathering a lot of people around me. My mom said I was so enjoying the music that my aunt decided to buy a cassette with the song which was playing at that moment..."
My project is about memories: false, true or somewhere in between. Since my earliest memories, there are events erased that I know have happened to me through documented evidence of them. Taking that footage as proof, l set out an investigation to make presumptions about these events. Being a child who travelled all around the USSR with my family, I am now exploring my cultural background through recreating missing links in the silent film.
What does it mean to duplicate or reflect something endlessly? I was drawn to the concept of mise en abyme—a self-referential repetition within a text or image. In nature, this phenomenon is studied through fractals, which connect to two of my main fascinations: visual illusions and plants.
In this project, I use the camera as a tool to explore mise en abyme, engaging with reflection, recursion, and infinity. These phenomena are deeply intertwined with our perception of nature. By experimenting with multiple projections of images, I create a narrative within a narrative—one that continuously unfolds, mirroring the self-similar structures found in the natural world.
The term degenerate art — adopted by the Nazi Party in the 1920s to label modern art they deemed unacceptable — served as the starting point for this research. Drawing from both her scientific background and an autobiographical experience in a museum in her hometown, Olga Permiakova playfully reimagines museums as vast filtering systems. Through personal appropriation, she explores the meta-structure of museums, questioning the ways in which they shape, classify, and control the perception of art.