Personal
Long Story Short
It started as a passion: I got a camera at school, took my first pictures of classmates, and became obsessed with Magnum photographers, flipping through their images every night before falling asleep. Black-and-white street photography took over from there. I enrolled at the Journalists’ Association of St. Petersburg, training under Sergey Maximishin as the youngest in the class, and completed two years program alongside finishing school. That’s where the observational eye came from — one that’s stayed with me ever since.
From there, my work became more conceptual, exploring the boundaries of the photographic medium, often with myself as the protagonist. Growing up in Russia, I had always dreamed of studying art in Europe, and a DAAD scholarship made that long-held dream come true. In Berlin, studying Media Art at the University of the Arts, I moved into video and installation — exhibitions, moving image, and a wild, experimental creative scene that changed the way I thought about visual language altogether. When the scholarship ended, I stayed on, working on a number of feature-film productions before eventually making my way to Zürich.
Moving to Switzerland became another turning point. The free, experimental years gave way to something steadier and more disciplined — but the eye stayed the same. The instinct for the decisive moment, conceptual freedom and Swiss precision are still all at work in the same hands.
Prefer the current work? Selected Work. →
Street Photography
Black and white, 35mm, the camera always within reach. Watching, waiting, ready for the decisive moment.
“What does it seek in foreign harbors? What did it leave in country own?”
— from “The Sail” by Mikhail Lermontov, 1832
Photo Series
Independent photo series, made long before any of this became a profession — just a camera, curiosity, and whatever story was in front of me.
Last Summer of Childhood
Series of 12 b/w photographs · 35mm film, digitized · 2006
Selishy is a typical Russian village of about 30 houses, some 300 km from St. Petersburg — the kind of place where opportunity is scarce and most young people leave for the city. My grandfather was born here; after his army service and years working in Petersburg, he returned upon retirement. For 16 consecutive summers, I spent my holidays with my grandparents there.
This series was made during what I sensed would be my last carefree summer of childhood — a collection of places, people and fleeting moments at the threshold of adulthood.
To See the Sea
Photo series, color · 35mm film, digitized · 2007
Growing up, the Black Sea existed in my imagination as something both romantic and unreachable. With my parents, the furthest we went was the dacha — that was the whole of summer. Crimea was something else entirely: a place out of Chekhov, out of every summer in classical literature, somewhere people simply went. Taking the bus from Belgorod to Crimea, there was no border, no customs, no thought of Crimea as politically contested territory — it was simply Crimea, familiar from stories, though unreachable until then.
Looking back, that journey carries a different weight. But these photographs belong to that earlier moment: two young women setting off on their own, figuring things out as we went, discovering a new landscape — and me, seeing the sea for the first time.
Superstitions
Series of 13 digital photographs · 2013
Old-fashioned superstitions that refuse to disappear — passed down, half-believed, and still quietly shaping the everyday life. This project stages that contradiction: superstition as something we claim to have outgrown, yet still live by.
- Don’t eat from the knife — otherwise you’ll grow cruel.
- Don’t sew clothes on your own body — otherwise your mind will be sewn up.
- You shouldn’t sit at the edge of a table or you’ll never get married.
- At the crossroads you shouldn’t pick anything up from the ground — that’s bad luck.
- When a spoon or fork falls to the floor, expect a woman at home. A knife falling means a man is coming.
- To cut your own hair is to shorten your own life.
- Getting up from bed with your left foot brings bad luck.
- When dishes break, that’s a sign of happiness.
- Scattered salt on the ground is bad luck — unless you throw a pinch of it over your left shoulder and laugh.
- Looking into a broken mirror is bad luck.
- If two girls look in a mirror at the same time, they’ll fall in love with the same boy.
- You shouldn’t take out the garbage after sunset.
- Finding a coin heads-up on the street brings luck.
P.S. — 13 is an unlucky number.
Video Art
At some point, a single frame became too tight for me. Video came next, deepened through my studies at UdK Berlin — work that found its way into galleries, public spaces and sometimes straight onto the street.
Heart of the Ocean
1-channel video installation · 1:50 min · HD, colour, sound · 2015
The urban space as a backdrop, the collective memory of film history as a starting point. Growing up in Russia in the 1990s, Titanic was a cultural sensation — Céline Dion’s song seemed to be playing everywhere, and the film’s imagery became part of a shared visual memory.
Looking for a setting in Berlin years later, I found myself drawn to Gropiusstadt — rows of blocks that felt strangely familiar, reminiscent of the buildings I had grown up around. Standing on the upper floors, the buildings opened onto a sweeping view of Berlin from above. That bird’s-eye perspective echoed the famous scene of Jack and Rose at the bow of the ship.
The video brings these two images together: the gestural symbolism of freedom from an epic Hollywood blockbuster meets an East Berlin residential area, a social hotspot since the 1980s. Personal memory of collective film history, staged against the reality of the urban space that produced it.
Ice & Tears
19:30 min · PAL · loop, no sound · 2012
Time runs. Tears run. Ice melts. That is essentially what happens in this 20-minute video — not much, perhaps, in cinematic terms, but long enough for a simple gesture to become uncomfortable.
Ice cream carries familiar associations of childhood, pleasure and carefree summer days. In advertising and cinema, it is usually used to evoke precisely this kind of lightness. Ice cream and tears, however, rarely appear together.
According to Wikipedia: “Moral courage is the willingness to stand up when others want you to sit down.” I like the simplicity of this definition. In my own way, I wanted to defy convention: to cry while holding an ice cream.
He Loves Me – He Loves Me Not
7:45 min · HD, colour, sound · 2012
Have you ever asked the head of state if he loves you? I did.
Fortune-telling is a well-known practice in Russia, used to glimpse the future or uncover hidden truths. Here, it’s pushed toward absurdity — plucking petals to find out whether Vladimir Putin loves me — pointing to the classical conflict between the “little man” and power, us and them.
A childish game of He loves me, he loves me not becomes a way of addressing the distance between the individual and political power. Made in 2012, the video has only grown more relevant with time.
Postcards
Ongoing project · 1-channel video, HD, no sound · installation: white paper, pin, mini-projector
The experience of visiting a tourist destination rarely matches the idealised image found on a postcard. Behind the serene, perfectly framed scenes are crowds, bad weather, souvenir vendors and the everyday reality of mass tourism. The peaceful place from the postcard is hard to recognise once you’re actually standing there.
Postcards captures this gap through short videos filmed at tourist attractions in cities including Berlin, St. Petersburg, Prague and Athens. The videos bring the postcard image back into its actual surroundings — exposing the distance between the idealised destination and the experience of being there.
I Study Art. – What Do You Paint?
2-channel video installation · HD, loop, sound · 2016 · final thesis project, Art & Media faculty, UdK Berlin
I Study Art. – What Do You Paint? serves as an ironic commentary on how art studies continue to be perceived today — and on the question of what, exactly, an artist does.
Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas is one of the most celebrated masterpieces in art history, famously depicting the artist himself alongside the royal family. In a playful inversion, this video adaptation brings twelve figures into a single frame, all dressed identically and distinguished only by their changing poses and gestures. Every figure is clearly the artist herself.
The connection to the historic source remains deliberately subtle. The shifting positions of the figures, their futile attempts to remain still, and the proportions of the artificial space hint at the original painting.
Stepping beyond the frame, Maysuk takes on yet another role. On a monitor beside the main projection, she delivers a video lecture about her own work — using the borrowed language of renowned art historians. The work becomes an artistic self-portrait in video form, authored, filmed, performed and critiqued by the same hand. How many roles does an artist take on when creating a work?
The work also turns the collaborative nature of video production on its head. Where film and video typically depend on a team, here every role is deliberately concentrated in one hand. Even the final stage becomes part of the performance: during her thesis presentation at the University of the Arts Berlin, Maysuk acted as curator, guiding visitors and professors through her own exhibition.
What happens when the fundamental elements of painting — colour, line, form, composition, perspective, light and shadow — are translated into video? And how much of Las Meninas remains recognisable when the painting itself disappears?
The work leaves the viewer with a final question: will you recognise the reference, or simply see twelve figures trying to hold still?
The Sail
12-channel video installation · 00:45 min · PAL, without sound · 2016
The site-specific video installation was created for the moving – images – underground, an art-in-public-spaces project, and screened at the central Friedrichstraße subway station in Berlin in 2016.
Across twelve screens, a water surface carries a four-line excerpt from The Sail (1832), a philosophical poem by the Russian poet Mikhail Lermontov. The perspective creates the illusion that, standing on the subway platform, you have found yourself aboard a sailing ship.
The poem appears in a different language on each screen, allowing as many passengers as possible to encounter it in their own language and experience it as something personal. The sailing ship becomes a metaphor for human existence, drifting between departure and destination, belonging and elsewhere:
“What does it seek in foreign harbors? What did it leave in country own?”
Read today, these lines can evoke the search for one’s place in a vast, globalised world, while also carrying echoes of displacement, migration and the experience of leaving one place for another.
Translations by Eric Boerner, Evgeny Bonver, Friedrich von Bodenstedt, Christoph Ferber, Zenon Gizizko, Babette Deutsch, and Avrahm Yarmolinsky.
Jagd
3 min · 16mm film, digitized · without sound · 2016
An ironic look at hunting, the tools and infrastructure humans have developed to become more effective hunters. Excerpts from German hunting law appear as “analogue subtitles,” handwritten pieces of paper dragged by hand through the frame, a nod to silent-film tradition, fitting for a video shot on 16mm and developed by hand.
Don’t Jump!
2-channel video installation · HD, loop, without sound · 2012
This site-specific video installation was created for the Windows art-in-public-spaces project, shown in March 2012 at the Deutscher Künstlerbund in Berlin.
Lit in stark, Caravaggio-style chiaroscuro, figures move in slow motion towards a single figure who, at the end, jumps. Projected directly into the gallery’s shop window, the work plays with the architecture of its setting: passers-by on the street become witnesses to a jump that never quite lands, repeating over and over again.
Art Piece Lives In Our Memory
1:30 min · HD, sound · 2011
The work explores the possibility of a quote within a quote. Its source material is Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers, which itself contains a scene from Queen Christina. By repeating the protagonists’ actions from that excerpt, I add a third layer — a quotation of a quotation — shifting the original scene into a new context.
With each repetition, the relationship between the original and its copies grows more ambiguous, raising questions about authorship, appropriation, and how images circulate through cultural memory.
The work also touches on questions of copyright, and references the white cube — the traditionally neutral, empty gallery space — as both a physical and conceptual setting.
The Modern Mating Call
17:00 min · HD, b/w, sound · 2012
A performance for the camera, captured simultaneously with three cameras to preserve the immediacy and physicality of the live piece.
Performance: Charly Roussel — double bass & sound
Video: Anna Maysuk — lights, camera & editing