You must be improved (2025 — ongoing)

“Will I still be myself?” — with this fear I faced in the autumn of 2024 when I decided to start taking antidepressants. At that time, I perceived pharmacological methods capable of fixing certain bugs in a person’s basic settings as a crude interference with the all-knowing nature, where serotonin doping might erase my identity.

Mood correction and the resulting reduction of suffering, achieved through chemical influence on the brain, are just the tip of the transhumanist iceberg. Emerging at the end of the 20th century as a materialist philosophical movement, transhumanism united its followers around the idea of prioritizing scientific and technological progress as the key condition for enhancing human viability. Promising truly long life, superintelligence, universal happiness, and prosperity, upgrade projects not only present us with new ethical and existential questions. Torn from their scientific context and reworked by mass culture, these projects also spawn stereotypes, myths, and frightening images of a future human encased in metal and stripped of emotions.

 My project is a play of restless imagination, centered around specific transhumanist theories and technologies: cryonics, cyborgization, printing and growing artificial organs, merging the brain with a computer.  

Using photographs of anatomical models and dolls from classified ads, I create collages and digital manipulations, assuming the role of a demiurge crafting a new biological species—and with it, a new reality. Sometimes pushing my imagination to absurdity, I try to grasp the very essence of humanity, reconcile with the inevitability of change, and understand whether it is possible to remain oneself in a world where technology allows us to assemble ourselves like a construction set.