In the embrace of death (2026) by Kateryna Kopeikina - subjektiv.art
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Kateryna Kopeikina
Artist from Ukraine
Kateryna Kopieikina was born in Donetsk, Ukraine, and in 2017 her artistic practice began with tattooing. Over time, it evolved into a multidisciplinary practice spanning painting, sculpture, performance, and movement. Her practice explores intimacy, displacement, grief, and the psychological consequences of war through personal narratives and symbolic imagery. Blurring the boundaries between reality, myth, and dark fairy tales, she creates emotionally charged works in which tenderness coexists with fear, desire, and loss. Drawing from lived experience and collective memory, her work examines how the body carries trauma and how care, ritual, and imagination become strategies for survival.
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The work was created specifically for the exhibition “Flimmering Connections” at the Mystetskyi Arsenal.
At the center of the composition is a person embracing death. In the context of war, death ceases to be a distant abstraction or a final event. It becomes a constant companion of everyday life, an invisible presence with which one must coexist.
The candles form a space that simultaneously evokes a place of remembrance, a prayer ritual, and the inner landscape of experience.
“Embrace” is an image of forced closeness with that which war has made part of everyday life. Death is no longer “somewhere nearby”—it enters the intimate sphere, becomes physically palpable, accompanying a person even in moments of silence.
Kateryna Kopieikina was born in Donetsk, Ukraine, and in 2017 her artistic practice began with tattooing. Over time, it evolved into a multidisciplinary practice spanning painting, sculpture, performance, and movement. Her practice explores intimacy, displacement, grief, and the psychological consequences of war through personal narratives and symbolic imagery. Blurring the boundaries between reality, myth, and dark fairy tales, she creates emotionally charged works in which tenderness coexists with fear, desire, and loss. Drawing from lived experience and collective memory, her work examines how the body carries trauma and how care, ritual, and imagination become strategies for survival.
