Leyla SamodurovaLeylaSamodurova

I build my artistic practice in the post-Soviet context of contemporary Russia, where personal and collective identity take shape amid fragmented memory and overproduction.

In painting I explore the transformation of identity through layered texture and image. Acrylic and dense, built-up layers of paint let me record how experience is changed, erased and overwritten by time and environment. In this way my handling of paint reconstructs the layered structure of identity itself.

In my drawing series I deliberately rely on academic techniques, using them as a tool to rethink contemporary experience and present-day forms of selfhood.

My clay sculptures and objects are bandaged — less an act of healing than a visual record of vulnerability, acceptance and a long process of recovery.

Working with ready-mades and found objects, I draw on archives and combine a symbolic system of my own — derived from the geolocation of artefacts, collective cultural heritage, and the stories and memories I hear while searching — with personal impressions. My approach to the material trace involves finding or making an artefact and analysing interviews, archives and other fragments of personal memory to arrive at a fitting set of symbols, a way of depicting them and of relating them to the found object. The texture of the work, as a material trace of authenticity, becomes a tactile bridge between the personal and the public.

Across drawing, figurative painting, sculpture and objects, I use texture as a universal carrier of materialised memory, visualising the transformation of identity through layers of different materials.

The central question of my practice: how do personal experience and time shape our selfhood amid inner and outer crises?