In May 2024, I presented The Virgin Lands — A Personal History, an exhibition rooted in the story of my grandparents and their experience of the Soviet Virgin Lands Campaign.

For a long time, I knew this history first through my family.

Not as dates, statistics or political decisions, but as the story of two people who met, worked, loved and built a life within circumstances much larger than themselves.

That difference became central to the exhibition.

History tends to preserve large events through collective narratives. But people do not experience history collectively. They experience it one life at a time — through relationships, uncertainty, hope, loss, work and ordinary decisions whose consequences may only become visible years later.

The paintings became my way of approaching that distance between history as it is recorded and history as it is lived.

I was not interested in illustrating the Virgin Lands Campaign or reconstructing the past.

I wanted to understand what remains when a historical event stops being a chapter in a textbook and becomes someone’s memory.

And perhaps this is why the exhibition remains so personal to me.

I began with the story of my grandparents.

But somewhere along the way, I realised I was asking a much larger question:

Where does history end — and a human life begin?