"Between Here and There": Sana Shahmuradova and the Language of Distance

Sometimes an artist speaks about what matters most, not at the moment they explicitly name “their subject,” but in the pause that comes right before it—when they are choosing words that won’t hurt by being too direct, too accurate. In her conversation with UFDA, Sana Shahmuradova pauses like that whenever the topic turns to home. In her story, home is not geography or an address; it is distance—first as the physical fact of emigration, then as an emotional habit, and now as a political trauma that does not let go, even in places filled with champagne, fairground noise, and perfectly calibrated light.​

Sana left Odesa in 2014 with her family-literally on the threshold of the Maidan and on the threshold of her own adulthood. She describes it neither as a “decision” nor as a dramatic “turning point,” but as a reset that happens almost by itself, because that is what migration does: you don’t transport your life to another country, you assemble it again from scratch - often without instructions. And that reassembly, strangely enough, became one of the reasons she was later able to feel Ukraine so sharply - not as an idea, but as an inner point of tension.​

In Canada, she gradually entered a peculiar state: living “there” while constantly looking “here.” Her nostalgia does not sound sweet; it sounds concentrated—like a hunger to return, turning every trip home into a ritual. In summer, she would come back to Odesa, spend part of the time in the village, stop in Kyiv for a few days, and each time repeat to herself that one day she would live in that city. Back then, the only barrier seemed to be distance and time. Now, after she has returned, it turns out the barrier can be different: the sense that your home is not merely far away—it can be taken from you.​

There is no standard art-school trajectory in Sana’s biography, and she does not romanticize that. On the contrary, she admits that the lack of a formal art education feeds impostor syndrome—as if everything happening in painting is accidental, as if a canvas simply “happened” rather than being made by her. But if one listens closely, it becomes clear that, in her case, “non-art” education was not a detour away from art; it was a way of finding language for what painting would later say without words.​

At first, there was political science—an almost naïve, patriotic desire to understand how the world is built, which still made sense in Ukraine and quickly lost its footing in Canada. Then came nutrition, an applied science: she speaks of it as if it were an attempt to grasp the basic materiality of life, to notice differences in everyday habits, to understand how “another country” enters the body. And alongside it, there was always drawing—not as a career and not as a strategy, but as the only steady gesture that helps you survive when a teenager’s familiar reality collapses.​

Later, she chooses psychology and completes a bachelor’s degree— a discipline that, as she puts it, constantly “proves it is a science,” demanding precision and strict formats of thinking. Yet even that strictness does not cancel what remained inside: an “unclosed gap”—a pull toward the humanities and the arts, toward questions that cannot be solved by a formula.​

When Sana returns to Ukraine in 2020, it sounds almost mundane: she simply buys a one-way ticket to Kyiv and does not plan her return. What matters is not only the step itself, but the way she describes the state of mind: “I’m here—and for now, I’m here.” There is no manifesto in that, but there is rare honesty: not pretending life is calculated when it isn’t.​

She looks for work, does translations, and keeps painting. And somewhere at the edge of that movement, a simple fact begins to surface: people want to have her works. She recalls how in Toronto she would give some away, sell some, and be surprised by the desire itself, by the idea that someone would pay money for an image. It doesn’t resemble “an artist’s path to success.” It resembles a slow permission to be seen.​

Sana speaks about painting as if it had a will of its own. The beginning of a work is intuitive: a form can grow out of an accident, a stain, a gesture; later, the artist begins to “read” what has appeared. Sometimes she uses references - more often from her own drawings or earlier works, more rarely from old masters: it would be difficult for her to maintain an academic discipline of color and composition, and in any case, it is not her goal.​

It is telling how she describes the impossibility of a “plan.” Plans, she says, often lead to wasted time: if you follow a pre-written scheme, you can simply mute the process. Her method, therefore, is not to arrive with a fixed thesis, but to let it emerge-and then to hold it without destroying it through explanation.​

Perhaps that is also why she finds it so hard to think about the viewer while working. The viewer is a parallel reality, and inside the studio, she is not yet a viewer herself: she does not fully “understand” what is happening. What interests her is not rational agreement but impact-down to the physiological level: when people say the works are anxious, frightening, “disturbing,” she takes pleasure not in their fear, but in the fact that the work is alive.​

The commercial side of art is not taboo for Sana; it is discomfort. She speaks openly about fear around pricing: when people asked for a price, she could not name one - not out of “pricelessness,” but because she did not understand how that world works. She adds another word: desacralization. The commodification of art always sounds like the risk of stripping an image of its inner sanctity.​

Against this background, she describes working with the Gunia Nowik gallery almost as a form of rescue: structure, precision, the keeping of an archive of works, and the handling of sales and institutional presentations. It removes the need for her to “translate” herself into market language again and again - leaving her the essential thing: the ability to keep working.​

Her attitude to “career strategy” is also important. She doesn’t believe in the myth that everything happens “by itself,” yet she does not describe her path as a chain of correctly sent emails. It is closer to an ecosystem: someone sees the work, tells someone else, invites, and introduces; Instagram functions as a diary rather than a storefront; an exhibition becomes a next link rather than a final destination.​

She speaks about Art Basel without gloss. It is a fair, Sana stresses, and it matters to remember that. But in her experience, Basel has its own specifics: there is space for the artist, not only for the gallery, and there is a bridge to institutions where a conversation can be deeper than “sold / not sold.”​

She clarifies details that often get lost in headlines: if there is any “first,” it is more likely the format of a solo project in the Statements sector, where one booth equals one artist and one project, without daily rotation. The project is submitted in advance as a concept, sometimes before the physical work even exists. And in this, paradoxically, one hears not triumph but temporal tension: while the fair prepares to receive a “finished story,” the artist is still living inside a process that changes faster than any deadline.​

The most powerful scene in the interview is Sana’s recollection of Unlimited. She sees the piece even before the official opening: the gigantic text reveals itself slowly, like a curtain, and her body reacts faster than her mind—shaking, anxiety rising. Then comes a quick check of the authorship, the realization that it is Bulatov and that the word reads “Vperyod” (“Forward”), and an immediate sense of absurdity: a crowd, polite noise, people passing by as if it were a neutral object, as if a word has no weight.​

She describes the moment almost cinematically: trying to “find champagne,” the inability to speak in a way that makes you heard, the feeling of standing in a room where language has stopped working. And then comes an internal dialogue, deeply human: what would the “brave version of me” do, what would her grandfather advise, where is the line between staying silent and betraying yourself? The answer turns out to be simple, because it cannot be otherwise: to make a gesture that marks the problem, even if - within a gigantic system, it looks like a micro-movement.​

It is also telling that people try to explain it away: “he is not political, he left the Soviet Union.” But for someone from Ukraine, this explanation works neither logically nor ethically—and throughout the interview, one can hear Sana trying to find at least some rational “why” behind the curatorial decision, and failing to find it. This is precisely the rupture between “context as a game” and context as the lived experience of war.​

The most precise formula she offers almost in passing is that the division between “here and there” is conditional, because reality is not limited to the place where the body is. The works are made in Kyiv-in matter, fatigue, news, in the air of a city under war. Yet they live in other spaces—and this asynchronicity simultaneously gives visibility and steals a sense of wholeness.​

In this sense, Sana’s story is not about “success in the West” and not about “an artist without an education.” It is a story about how distance becomes a language; how intuition turns into method; how home stops being background and becomes the lens through which everything else is read—including the fair, the light, the smiles, the word “forward,” and the world’s attempt to pretend this is merely aesthetics.​