Oxana Taran

Oxana Taran is a Ukrainian artist born in 1963.

Memory plays an important role in her work. In order to understand her drawings, her paintings and her installations, one needs to know some information about her childhood in Kiev, Ukraine, as well as the geographic and intellectual migration that have marked her entire life. After quitting her childhood city, “flexibility” became the word of order in her life. Taran needed to adapt ceaselessly to new cultures, foreign languages, new lifestyles, new people, or, as she puts it herself, to “an almost schizophrenic life path”: she doesn’t live in only one world, but in several worlds and realities at the same time, and, despite their similarities, these worlds have very little elements in common.

Actually, Taran is fascinated neither by our Occidental dialectics, nor by the one inspired by Marxism. She is not interested in its result either - the hideous Sovietic propaganda with its posters and boring billboards inspired by Russian constructivism of the ‘20s that were everywhere in Kiev during her childhood. Today, they are merely nostalgic relics of a lost ideology (or utopia) that has disappeared for a long time. Taran stays unaffected by our occidental empiricism. She is a child of non-occidental cultural, mystique and spiritual roots that were the basis on which all of Russia was built: the Asian-Mongolian culture on the one hand, and the byzantine culture on the other.