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Tamara Safarova
Artist from Ukraine
Tamara Safarova (b. 1992) is a Ukrainian artist of Azerbaijani origin who lives and works in Kyiv, Ukraine. She started her artistic career in 2022 in response to russia full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Working across painting, graphics, comics, photography, digital media, and performance, Safarova explores themes of identity, memory, cultural heritage, gender, trauma and transformation.
Her work seeks to expose the invisible: making internalised experiences and collective silences visible, felt, and shared. Mythology, personal history, and symbolic archetypes form the core of her artistic vocabulary.
Safarova’s visual language often bridges the deeply personal with the mythic and the political, grounded in both the natural world and the layered cultural context of post-soviet and postcolonial experiences.
Her first solo exhibition took place in 2022 at the Kunstmuseum in Stuttgart, Germany. Since then, her work has been shown internationally, including at Santa Maria delle Grazie (Venice, Italy), Kühlhaus (Berlin, Germany), the National Museum of Ukrainian Folk Decorative Art (Kyiv, Ukraine), Mystetskyi Arsenal (Kyiv, Ukraine), and Poltava Art Museum (Poltava, Ukraine).
Her works are held in public collections in Italy, Belgium, and Ukraine.
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Tamara Safarova
Artist from Ukraine
Tamara Safarova (b. 1992) is a Ukrainian artist of Azerbaijani origin who lives and works in Kyiv, Ukraine. She started her artistic career in 2022 in response to russia full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Working across painting, graphics, comics, photography, digital media, and performance, Safarova explores themes of identity, memory, cultural heritage, gender, trauma and transformation.
Her work seeks to expose the invisible: making internalised experiences and collective silences visible, felt, and shared. Mythology, personal history, and symbolic archetypes form the core of her artistic vocabulary.
Safarova’s visual language often bridges the deeply personal with the mythic and the political, grounded in both the natural world and the layered cultural context of post-soviet and postcolonial experiences.
Her first solo exhibition took place in 2022 at the Kunstmuseum in Stuttgart, Germany. Since then, her work has been shown internationally, including at Santa Maria delle Grazie (Venice, Italy), Kühlhaus (Berlin, Germany), the National Museum of Ukrainian Folk Decorative Art (Kyiv, Ukraine), Mystetskyi Arsenal (Kyiv, Ukraine), and Poltava Art Museum (Poltava, Ukraine).
Her works are held in public collections in Italy, Belgium, and Ukraine.
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Vyriy
Painting by Tamara Safarova
145 x 50 cm • Oil on canvas
Location:
Kyiv, Ukraine
According to the pre-Christian beliefs of Ukrainians, vyriy is a warm country on an island across the sea, where the souls of the dead and the unborn live, where birds fly away for the winter, and where the Tree of Life, the cosmogonic centre of the world, grows. The tree expresses the golden trinity of life, the eternal, living and bright trinity of the Sun god.
An important place in the vyriy is occupied by the alatyr (altar) - a stone on which the Tree of Life grows and the eternal fire burns. Many green shoots and rivers flow from under the stone. Our forefathers believed that the cuckoo, which has the keys to it, is the earliest to fly to the nest, and the latest to return from it.
The wooden cross is the most common primitive form of the Tree of Life. Birth is impossible without death, as the future impossible without knowledge of the past. The names of those who died in the war with russia for the sake of our lives are engraved on the altar.
Thus, the ancient myth finds a tragic reflection in the present.
Location:
Kyiv, Ukraine
About the artist
Tamara Safarova
Artist from Ukraine
Tamara Safarova (b. 1992) is a Ukrainian artist of Azerbaijani origin who lives and works in Kyiv, Ukraine. She started her artistic career in 2022 in response to russia full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Working across painting, graphics, comics, photography, digital media, and performance, Safarova explores themes of identity, memory, cultural heritage, gender, trauma and transformation.
Her work seeks to expose the invisible: making internalised experiences and collective silences visible, felt, and shared. Mythology, personal history, and symbolic archetypes form the core of her artistic vocabulary.
Safarova’s visual language often bridges the deeply personal with the mythic and the political, grounded in both the natural world and the layered cultural context of post-soviet and postcolonial experiences.
Her first solo exhibition took place in 2022 at the Kunstmuseum in Stuttgart, Germany. Since then, her work has been shown internationally, including at Santa Maria delle Grazie (Venice, Italy), Kühlhaus (Berlin, Germany), the National Museum of Ukrainian Folk Decorative Art (Kyiv, Ukraine), Mystetskyi Arsenal (Kyiv, Ukraine), and Poltava Art Museum (Poltava, Ukraine).
Her works are held in public collections in Italy, Belgium, and Ukraine.
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