Pelulya: Capturing a crumbling collage of reality

Author: Jenya Stashkov, art critic

There are many artistic strategies for cognition, fixation, and transformation of everyday reality. We exist in a world of objects and representations of objects. Our everyday lives are filled with interaction with a variety of objects. We also act as objects in some types of interactions with the world. One of the main goals of contemporary art is the formulation and reformulation of the concept of boundaries. The boundaries between objects, boundaries between bodies, boundaries between countries, boundaries between self and non-self, and so on. Boundaries in contemporary art are considered a set of practises of protection, discrimination, and multiplication of reality.

Pelulya (aka Polina Abramova) is an excellent and super-reflexive example of working with the concept of boundaries. She works in a mixed interdisciplinary technique combining photography, collage, digital, and activist utterance. Her artworks are a fixation and reconstruction of an open, limitless reality. According to the author“s art cosmology, a world without boundaries can exist in a state of frozen scattering. Therefore, the collage elements included in the body of the photo look as if they were suspended in the air. Reality without boundaries, according to Pelulya”s vision, is a suspended state—a feeling of losing the ground under your feet combined with a sense of freedom—and all possible.

However, the artist is not satisfied with the mere transfer of this fragile synesthetic state. The models' bodies are also an important part of her artistic world. These bodies seem to be transcendent to the main message of her works. They exist more on the mythological and political axes. On the one hand, they refer to the chthonic bundle of the “female body — earth”, and on the other, they refer to the transgressive practises of the 20th century. Interestingly, the use of nudity is not sexual objectification; on the contrary, nudity is a deterrent (even ascetic) factor. This factor does not allow the crumbling world to finally crumble.

Pelulya uses a very wide range of visual techniques: hyperrealism, deformation, fading, blurring, doubling, and inclusion of physical objects. Her works are full of references to the intellectual Western culture of the last few centuries, but completely original.

It seems to me that Polina Abramova’s general artistic message can be described as therapeutic, exciting, and a little disturbing. It captures an uninhabitable world (scary, disturbing, and prone to destruction) and offers a strategy for survival in it. The essence of this strategy is to consciously place oneself in a suspended, ungrounded state for the sake of experiencing absolute freedom. It seems to me that this statement hides a large-scale humanistic and liberating potential.

Polina Abramova is an excellent example of a brave and outstanding artist who boldly defends her unique vision. Of course, her artistic language and uncompromising attitude toward the world and its unshakable borders expand the boundaries of modern mixed art. I urge you to follow her art!

I strongly recommend that you visit Polina’s personal art website:

pelulya.art