Karolina Poliakova, Untitled from the series Urban Collages, 2020

digital print, paper, 70 х 50 cm

Collage as an art technique is used by me as an attempt to deepen the perceived reality. My visual experience as a resident of Belarus includes fields or picturesque forest landscapes, above which rise artificial mountains in the form of tall skyscrapers of human existence - houses. Traveling to corners of the world beyond ordinary landscapes has allowed me to develop my eye muscles and perceive the Earth in its various forms, shapes, sizes and distances. Memory retains imperfect reflections of feelings and what is visible, and the subconscious mixes everything together, sending it to us later in dreams. The collages are an act of creating reality from fragments of the past, proposing a sense of incomplete comprehensibility and imperfection of the familiar space from Eastern European dreams. The collages consist of the author's photographs - preserved moments of the present, which have been spliced into a new reality, as in a dream.

Karolina Polyakova (1992, Lida, Belarus) is an artist who uses photography, video and collage as media. She has changed schools and universities three times, pursuing photography since 2008. In 2013, she moved to Minsk, where through self-education and working with digital photography and video, she found her place in youth journalism and later also in the news industry. She did reportage on punk-rock concerts for women, searched for owls in the Belovezhskaya Pushcha and photographed musicians in Belarus. Karolina has always tried to find ways to render reportage plots in depth, which has led to the ability to create animated coverage of concerts and exhibitions. The combination of music and visual art has fascinated the artist since childhood, which is why her career is based on creating music videos for Belarusian musicians: projects with show-biz stars such as Sergei Mikhalok - Lyaпіс-98 and Drezden, 2 clips of ethno trip-hop group Shuma, and the latest work - nostalgic images of life and escape from Belarus on a bicycle for the band Разбитое Сердце Пацана. Since 2018, she has been creating photo collages from photos from her archive, and has found her style by expanding the horizons of the Eastern European landscape. She has participated in group and solo exhibitions, including presenting her work on Minsk billboards, showing the city as she sees it. As of 2020, she went on a business trip to Kiev and did not return to Belarus, continuing to work with her photographic archive. Since 2021, she has lived in Warsaw, where she continued to work as a photojournalist, completing and working on her photographic archive, as well as experimenting with different materials for photography and artistic expression. Since the end of 2021, she started her brand "Бессмертна" ("Immortal"), where photo-collages and semantic revolutions find their place and speak back to people associated with Belarus around the world. In addition to her visual practice, she also took up music - Karolina became one of the founders of the women's choir in exile "Spievy", the repertoire includes Belarusian pre-Christian songs.
She now lives in Warsaw and continues to be the voice of her generation.