VARVARA UHLIK

PLAY GROUND

SWAN

SUNSHINE, HOW ARE YOU?

SLAV GAZE

DIGITAL (AFTER)

COMMISSIONS AND NOT

about

Varvara Uhlik (b. 1997, Dnipro, Ukraine) is a Ukrainian visual artist based in London. She holds an MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art, where she was awarded the Kenneth Armitage Young Sculptor Prize and the Clare Winsten Memorial Award. Prior to that, she studied Photography at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague.

Rooted in her personal history and the landscapes of her upbringing in Eastern Ukraine, her work explores the inherited complexities of post-Soviet identity. Through photography, video, sculpture, and installation, Varvara navigates themes of generational trauma, cultural memory, and the enduring shadow of Russian imperialism on both individual lives and the wider socio-political fabric of Eastern Europe.

Central to her practice is the act of digital archiving — a means of piecing together fractured memories and inaccessible geographies. Since the 2014 occupation of Crimea, and more acutely during the ongoing full-scale war, Varvara’s connection to formative places and people has been mediated through fading family albums, online fragments, and pixelated remnants. Her photographs confront the tension between the permanence of digital records and the physical absence they represent, inviting a nuanced reflection on belonging, loss, and the slipperiness of memory — particularly in an age when even memory can be fabricated by AI, blurring the boundaries between truth and fabrication.

In her photographic work, she reworks personal family archives alongside newly constructed scenes, to create visual narratives that move between the imagined and the remembered. In her video and installation practice, she incorporates found imagery, online sources, and mapping tools such as Google Maps to further examine themes of displacement, reconstruction, and the digital mediation of memory. Across media, scenes of folkloric domesticity, intimate rituals, and imagined returns create spaces where rupture and repair coexist, and personal and collective histories intertwine.

In 2024, she was selected as one of the British Journal of Photography’s Ones to Watch. That same year she was shortlisted for the PhMuseum Photography Grant. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at Photo Élysée Museum (2025), Milan Photo Fair (2024, 2025), Encontros da Imagem (2024), and Liquida Photofestival (2025), and was featured in publications such as The Guardian, BJP, Photoworks, Riga Photography Biennial 2025, Der Greif, Paris Photo, and LensCulture among others.

CV

Born in 1997 in Dnipro, Ukraine
Based in London, UK

education

2023-2025
MA Fine Art: Media, Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, London, UK (Distinction)
2019-2022
BA Photography, Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, Netherlands
2016-2019
BA Arts and Media Management, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland

solo exhibitions

2025

Sunshine, How Are You?, Liquida Photofestival, Polo del '900, Turin, Italy

selected group exhibitions

2026

FOCUS, Artphilein Foundation, Lugano, Switzerland
Sunshine, How Are You?, Fotofestival Lenzburg, Lenzburg, Switzerland

2025

Gen Z. Shaping a New Gaze, Photo Elysée, Lausanne, Switzerland
Rebirth, Spilka Paris & Honchar Museum, Galerie Cinema, Paris, France
MIA Photo Fair Milano, Irinox Award, Milan, Italy

2024

Encontros da Imagem, International Photography and Visual Arts Festival, Braga, Portugal
Der Greif: Arles Edition, Rencontres d'Arles, portfolio screening, ParisBerlin Fotohaus, Arles, France

MIA Photo Fair Milano, ‘Welcome To My Unknown’ exhibition, Milan, Italy

2023

REGENERATE: Noorderlicht International Photo Festival, Groningen, Netherlands
Public Space Exhibition 2023, Altona, Hamburg, Germany
Free Range, AOP Student Awards, Truman Brewery, London, UK

2022