Yeva Kafidova

Yeva Kafidova is a Ukrainian artist whose work examines themes of transformation, cyclicality, and the human experience of war.

The artist works across multiple media, including graphic techniques, ceramics, glass, photography, and painting. Yeva Kafidova’s art has been exhibited extensively in Ukraine and abroad.

The artist was born in 2001 in Nova Kakhovka, Ukraine. Yeva studied at the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture and received her BA degree in 2022. 

Yeva Kafidova has participated in “Context” residency (2022, Velychko gallery, Paphos, Cyprus) and “Khata-Maisternya” residency (2023, Asortymentna Kimnata, Babyn, Ukraine). 

Yeva Kafidova’s paintings, graphic works, and other pieces have been exhibited in numerous shows in Ukraine and abroad. Notable shows include “The beast came out of the forest” at Pinchuk Art Centre in Kyiv (2025), “Nobody. Nowhere. Never. Indeed!” at Dnipro Center for Contemporary Culture (DCCC) in Dnipro (2024), “i am u are” at Culver City in Los Angeles (2023), “Ukrainian 12” at Portraits International in Brussels (2023), and many more. 

Currently, the artist lives and works in Kyiv.

In her works, the artist explores the balance between the real and the unreal — the existence, scale, and contrast of the boundary between these two states. Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, she has been reflecting on and processing the experience of war, as well as the concepts of “home,” its definition, and its loss. 

Yeva Kafidova works with various graphic techniques (diatype, monotype, drypoint, printing on thin sheet metal, and others) and also uses ceramics, glass, photography, and painting.

UFDA has digitized her works, such as “Spring at Home” (2025), “This was meant to be a funny title” (2025), “My waters” series (2025), “Will and Freedom” (2024), “Tachanka and UFO” series (2023), “Transparent” series (2023), “Ultrasound of Butterfly Cocoons” series (2023), among many others. 

Yeva Kafidova’s artistic practice is shaped by several key ideas, including “everything passes” and “everything will be fine again, and then bad again.” This perspective guides both her choice of materials and the ideas she engages with. Drawn to fragile, unstable, and easily altered substances, she works with media that echo the precarity of memory and the unpredictability of life. Her practice spans paper-based works using monotype, diatype, and gelatin printing, as well as ceramics, metal, etc. 

A recurring point of return in Yeva Kafidova’s work is her hometown, Nova Kakhovka — a place she revisits as a way to examine belonging, identity, and the shifting nature of place. She reflects on how the notion of “home” transforms because of occupation, and what it means to come from a place that now exists in a contested space.

Yeva explores how memory reshapes itself when familiar experiences gain new meaning. Her work often examines how memory manifests within the body, whether through muscle memory or physical changes like hair loss. Drawing on myth, she investigates the delicate boundary between death and not-death, attempting to ease humanity’s enduring fear of mortality.