Alina Zamanova

Alina Zamanova is a Ukrainian visual artist working primarily with painting and sculpture. Her practice engages with the lived reality of war, exploring how violence reshapes human experience, memory, and the environment.

Zamanova's artistic practice is grounded in reflections on trauma, memory, and the land as a silent witness to history. She approaches landscape as a living archive that absorbs human actions and preserves their consequences, exploring the traces that conflict leaves on bodies, places, and everyday life through attentive observation and material sensitivity.

Born in 1993 in Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine, Alina Zamanova currently lives and works in Kyiv. She holds a BA (Hons) in Illustration from the University of the Arts London, completed in 2015. Since the beginning of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, her artistic practice has taken on a direct and urgent engagement with the realities of war, responding to shared conditions of violence and displacement.

Working with painting and sculpture, Zamanova documents shifting everyday realities shaped by invasion — disrupted routines, altered landscapes, and fractured forms of belonging. Her works have been presented internationally, including exhibitions in London, Berlin, Brussels, Mechelen, Los Angeles, New York, Hamburg, and Kyiv. In 2025, she participated in the Tracey Emin Residency in Margate, UK.

Among Zamanova's notable projects is "Embodied Memory Rooted into a Ruptured Landscape" (2025), presented at Mulier Mulier Gallery in Brussels. Other significant exhibitions include "Our Children Are Fighting Too" (2022), "Vibrations of Nature" (2024), and group presentations such as "Art For Change" at Saatchi Gallery (2024) and "Bodyland" at Max Hetzler Gallery (2022). Her work has been recognized through awards and shortlists, including the Art For Change Prize Europe and the John Moores Painting Prize.

In the ongoing series "Days of Full-Scale War" (since 2022), Zamanova creates self-portraits using Ukrainian soil, treating the land as a material witness that absorbs personal and collective wartime memory. The installation "Children" (2022-2024) is built around a damaged window frame found during evacuation and features painted portraits of Ukrainian children, transforming the window into a fragile threshold of trauma, loss, and endurance.

The painting "Our Children Are Fighting Too" (2022) addresses the abrupt rupture of childhood caused by war, honoring children forced to flee, endure displacement, or lose their sense of safety. Other significant works by Alina Zamanova include "Pressure of Memories" (2023), "The New Reality" (2023), "Through the Hardships till the Light is Visible" (2024), "Fading Memory" (2025), and "After" (2025), which explore how violence reshapes perception, memory, and everyday reality.

All these digitized pieces are available for viewing on the UFDA website.

Zamanova's visual language is marked by attentiveness to material, surface, and space. Her works avoid overt narration, allowing meaning to emerge through subtle shifts, traces, and absences, while landscape functions as a bearer of memory and evidence.

Rather than depicting events directly, Zamanova creates spaces for reflection where personal and collective experiences intersect. As part of a generation of Ukrainian artists shaped by war, her work offers a quiet but persistent engagement with loss, endurance, and the responsibility to witness the present.