REFLECTION OF WATER IN YOU Embroidery is Zakharova’s main technique in her creative method. It is intertwined with the entity of time. Each period of time the artist spends stitching is carefully recorded on paper. It is like she is trying not to let a precious point in time slide through her hands - while applying a stitch by stitch, she relives this moment again and again, pins it down and makes it more real. And while repeating the monotonous movement over and over, she enters a certain state of timelessness, where nothing is defined, but changes under the influence of feelings. Dunya’s peculiar relationship to time feeds her deep keenness on rivers. It is an ever persistent element in her work. For her, the flowing element of a river symbolizes irreversible passage of time, and with that – anticipation of a future. Every city or town Dunya lived in she found herself residing by a river which she had a very different connection with. In her recent series of works Zakharova meditates on the role that these water arteries played in her life. In the self-portrait we see Dunya’s face crossed by the Vilyuy River, which she lived by as a child. Being the most ecologically problematic river in the Yakutsk region, it carries a lot of sadness and fears of those who live around it. In this series even pink becomes a toxic color for Dunya as a symbol of contaminated rivers, which often turn pink after chemical waste enters them. Zakharova has been living right by the Moscow River for a while. And through the work titled “River Moscow” she is trying to resolve the feeling of indifference she has towards this particular body of water. She associates it with a woman’s fate as the river has a feminine name. The embroidery called “River Ouse” was inspired by Olivia Lang's book "To the River” in which she describes her journey along the Ouse, where her idol Virginia Woolf drowned. It was an intentional journey in order to feel and grasp the role of rivers in human life and Wolfe’s in particular. In the work the artist captures the fluidity of Virginia Woolf’s body so fragile and strong, pierced by the line of the river, by which she lived all her life and in which she died. Dunya Zakharova pays a lot of attention to the quality of surfaces, achieving maximum expressiveness of the material, filling the newest embroideries on canvas with a combination of loneliness, tenderness, melancholy and fatality. She repeats how rivers always remain unfamiliar to her, but the river is also something that can take her away from here and, thus, contains hope. Ekaterina Soriano |
aaaaaaaaaa“221 h 05 m”, 140 x 190 cm, emroidery on fabric, 2022
“Embrace the river with your arms”, 180,5 x 140,5 cm, embroidery on fabric, 2021
This is me embracing my native river Vilyui in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia),on the bank of which my childhood passed. Being the main landmark in the space of memories, it still flows in my life somewhere there in the crevices of the landscape of the present. The restless murmur of the suffering river echoes. Once a clean river that helped my ancestors survive, it has now become one of the most ecologically problematic rivers in the region because of the various industrial discharges of a diamond mining company.
‘106 hours 33 minutes’, 44 x 34 cm, embroidery on fabric, 2021
‘River Vilyuy’, 31 х 36 cm, embroidery on fabric, 2021
‘River Ouse’, 38 х 48 см, embroidery on fabric, 2021