Viktoria Sorochinski

About the Artist

Because of religious and political tensions, Viktoria Sorochinski ( b. 1979 Ukraine)  left the former USSR with her parents in 1990 at the age of 11. After living in Israel and subsequently in Canada, where she obtained a BFA from Concordia University, Montreal in 2006, she now works and lives in New York City. She received an MFA from New York University, NYC in 2008.

It was in Montreal in 2005 that she began to photograph a little girl, then aged 3 and her mother, 23, also Russian. Today she still pursues this subtle work of observation and interpretation, by capturing the stages of Eve’s evolution and of her relationship with Anna.

Artist Statement

Anna & Eve is a large ongoing narrative project that I started to work on in 2005.

This project (as well as most of my work) dwells in between fantasy and documentary. Even though, all the scenes are staged, they reveal a real relationship of a mother and her daughter. Anna (the mother) and Eve (the daughter) were particularly interesting to me, when I first met them in 2005, because the boundary between the child and the adult woman was blurred to an unusually high degree. This was primarily due to the mother’s young age (23); it seemed at times that she was more of a child than her 3 year-old daughter. It was often hard to tell who held the power and control between the two, and who was learning the essence of being a human in this world.

Since 2005, I have created 5 different series with Anna and Eve: “Dream House” 2005-2006, “Wood’s Tale” 2006-2007, “Being Light” 2008, “Small Epiphanies” 2009 and the latest one “Little Big Life” 2010. I was always interested in folk tales as a representation of common knowledge, and their influence on children’s perception of good and bad, and of morality. Therefore, in the earlier series I often applied to my photography a frame of a myth or a folk tale. These photographs were not based on particular tales, but rather they were new myths that represented my interpretation of the real relationship of this mother and daughter through phantasmagoric scenes.

Viktoria Sorochinski’s Website

Viktoria Sorochinksi at Galerie Philippe Chaume

Viktoria Sorchinksi at Edelman Gallery

posted by Carmelita Caruana