Olga Axenova

2022 —present

Embodying Ophelia: Letters to the Self

This project serves as a personal diary, capturing an altered internal state shaped by external influences. In this work, I draw a parallel between my own image and that of Ophelia.

This approach is my attempt to explore how innate biological characteristics—specifically gender—affect the perception of everyday realities that exist outside my artistic practice. At the same time, it is a way of returning to a reality distorted by a fevered mind. This approach also allows me to observe, through graphic notations and sketches, how the personal image—constructed externally within social frameworks and then expressed by me through my art—becomes transformed.

The figure of Ophelia is deeply embedded in the Western cultural tradition. Within her, I find both the possibility of embracing one’s inherent nature and a means of distancing oneself from it—an escape. However, this could prove to be a mistake.

I view this potential mistake as an ontological fact—an impossibility of altering an action that has already been taken, one that leads toward an irreversible conclusion. These kinds of experiences are reflected in my works, where an initially distinct silhouette begins to dissolve into strips of color, ultimately losing its original figurative clarity.