Overview

Sana Shahmuradova is a Ukrainian artist currently based in Kyiv however a significant part of her childhood was spent in the countryside in the Podillia region, among rivers and forests. In 2014 she relocated to Toronto as an immigrant where she received her Bachelor of Arts in Psychology at York University, Toronto, ON in 2020. Following this Sana made a decision to return to the city of Kyiv which has always inspired her.

As a visual artist, Sana mainly works with graphics and painting, searching for the barely explored roots of her ancestry through collective and personal archetypes, with her current work reflecting upon the war in her homeland.

With the outbreak of a full-scale war, Sana started working with the remnants of old wallpaper, tree bark, fireproof old cloth, often using old rotten or reclaimed boards for her compositions. Sana found most of these materials in her grandmother’s barn, which served as a studio for first three months of a full-scale invasion, in spring 2022.

This time overlapped with a period of sowing food and crops, Sana started working on highlighting a sowing and harvest crisis in Ukraine caused by the war brought on by Russia, often searching for parallels found in Ukrainian history as well as in Ukrainian mythology to the present issues. The fact that many Ukrainian myths are not quite certain and easy to be explored enables Sana to experiment and develop the narratives she researching.

Nevertheless, certain historical facts are distinctly clear: it is not the first time Ukrainian land is experiencing genocide brought there by the Moscovian regime.

Sana Shahmuradova’s Website