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, Ukraine) is a visual artist based in London. 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 2025, Varvara was selected for New Contemporaries and received both the Kenneth Armitage Young Sculptor Prize and the Clare Winsten Memorial Award. In 2024, she was named one of the British Journal of Photography’s Ones to Watch and was shortlisted for the PhMuseum Photography Grant.

Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at The Sunday Painter, London (2025); Photo Élysée Museum, Switzerland (2025); European Photography Month, Tokyo (2025); MIA Milan Photo Fair, Italy (2024, 2025); Encontros da Imagem, Portugal (2024); and Liquida Photofestival, Italy (2025). Her work has appeared in publications such as The Guardian, Beaux Arts Magazine, Photoworks, Riga Photography Biennial 2025, Der Greif and LensCulture, 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 Photography, Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, Netherlands

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


2026


2025



selected group exhibitions
2026

  • New Contemporaries 2026, South London Gallery, London, UK
  • FOCUS, Artphilein Foundation, Lugano, Switzerland
  • New Contemporaries 2026, MIMA (Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art), Middlesbrough, UK

2025


2024


2023

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


press 
2025
2024


2023



selected publications


2025


2024





awards & grants
2025
  • Gilbert Bayes Award, Royal Society of Sculptors
  • Kenneth Armitage Young Sculptor Prize, The Kenneth Armitage Foundation
  • Clare Winsten Memorial Award, UCL
  • Sarabande: The Lee Alexander McQueen Foundation Emerging Artist Grant

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
    2025

    • Press Conference, SEEEU, WPÜ SHINJUKU, Tokyo, Japan
    • Workshop, Imaginary Spaces: Storytelling Through Photography, South London Gallery, London, UK
    • Workshop, Bookbinding Basics, South London Gallery, London, UK 
    • Workshop, Image Collage: Making New Meanings, 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