VARVARA UHLIK


SCULPTURE & INSTALLATION:

PLAY GROUND II
(2025)

LYOH
(2025)

PLAY GROUND
(2025)

SWAN
(2024)

DIGITAL (AFTER)
(2023)

PLAYLAND
(2023)


PHOTOGRAPHY:

SUNSHINE, HOW ARE YOU?
(2023-2024)

SLAV GAZE
(2021)



ABOUT

about


Varvara Uhlik (b. 1997, Dnipro) is a Ukrainian visual artist based in London, working across photography, video, sculpture, and installation. Rooted in her own history and the landscapes of eastern Ukraine where she grew up, her work traces the inherited complexities of post-Soviet identity: generational trauma, cultural memory, and the long shadow Russian imperialism casts over individual lives and the wider fabric of Eastern Europe.

At the centre of her practice is a question about how history and ideology become material. Political power inscribes itself into objects, architectures, and public spaces, and Varvara is drawn to how those inscriptions are lived with, absorbed into the body, and passed down long after the regime that made them has gone. Her materials carry that history directly: Soviet-era objects, industrial remnants, and found imagery, chosen for their relationship to the time and place she is researching.

Since the 2014 occupation of Crimea, and more acutely through the full-scale war, her connection to formative people and places has been mediated by fading family albums, online fragments, and pixelated remnants. Her photographs hold the tension between the permanence of the digital record and the physical absence it stands in for, opening a reflection on belonging, loss, and the slipperiness of memory in an age when memory itself can be fabricated and the line between truth and invention no longer holds.

In her sculpture and installation, these questions take physical form. Reconstructing the ideological architecture of Soviet and post-Soviet life, and the industrial infrastructures that shaped imagination through uniformity and control, she gives Ukrainian history and identity weight and spatial presence, making the effects of Russian imperialism not only visible but materially felt.

In 2026 Varvara was named a Foam Talent Runner-up by Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam and nominated as a FUTURES Photography Talent by PhotoIreland. The year before she was selected for New Contemporaries, in a cohort The Telegraph described as the artists shaping the future of British art, and in 2024 she was named one of the British Journal of Photography's Ones to Watch. She has been a member of the Royal Society of Sculptors since 2025, having received its Gilbert Bayes Award.

Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at South London Gallery (2026); The Sunday Painter, London (2025); Artphilein Foundation, Switzerland (2026); Palmer Gallery, London (2025); Photo Élysée Museum, Switzerland (2025); European Photography Month in Tokyo, Japan (2025); and MIA Milan Photo Fair (2024, 2025). It has featured in publications including The Guardian, Beaux Arts Magazine, Foam Magazine, Wallpaper, Vanity Fair Italia, and the Riga Photography Biennial 2025, among others.


CV

Born 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 Design: Photography, Royal Academy of Art (KABK), The Hague, Netherlands

 2016-2019
BA: Arts and Media Management, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland
solo exhibitions


2026


2025



selected group exhibitions
2026


2025


2024


2023

  • REGENERATE: Noorderlicht International Photo Festival, Groningen, Netherlands
  • Public Space Exhibition 2023, Altona, Hamburg, Germany


selected press & publications 
2026


2025
2024


2023





awards & grants
2026

2025

2024
  • PARIS PHOTO (finalist), Carte Blanche
  • Belfast Photo Festival (shortlist), awarded “Highly Commended”
  • Athens Photo Festival (shortlist)
  • PhMuseum Photography Grant (shortlist)

2023

  • PARIS PHOTO (finalist), Carte Blanche


    talks & workshops
    2026

    2025

    • Press Conference, SEEEU, WPÜ SHINJUKU, Tokyo, Japan
    • Workshop, Imaginary Spaces: Storytelling Through Photography, Art Block, South London Gallery, London, UK
    • Workshop, Bookbinding Basics, Art Block, South London Gallery, London, UK 
    • Workshop, Image Collage: Making New Meanings, Art Block, South London Gallery, London, UK 
    • Workshop, CTRL +C, CTRL V, Cell Project Space x Blackhorse Activators, London, UK
    • Workshop, The Looms, Cell Project Space x Blackhorse Activators, London, UK

    2024




    LIMITED EDITIONS:

    Gertrude | AucArt