TANYA AKHMETGALIEVA

Tanya Akhmetgalieva’s work reconstructs reality from dreams, reveries, and memories gathered from disparate sources, shaping an assemblage of treasures.

This graphic series evokes echoes of childhood, where each individual harbored their personal “hiding place” for cherished possessions. These repositories, or treasure troves, remain veiled secrets for the young. In adulthood, they evolve into enigmas withheld from disclosure.

Watercolors form an uneven backdrop, stretching across the paper like memories—frozen, yet dissolving with the passage of time. The “Unexpected Guest” series chronicles the carousel of events that populate an individual’s life, as emotions disperse across time and space. These drawings immortalize objects and moments, establishing a museum of memories, each object imbued with its own history and provenance. Collecting this narrative not for the sake of recounting, but as a private completion, akin to a forgotten childhood toy now residing on the antique shop’s shelf, where memories gather dust and reality evolves into phantoms.

The central figure of this visual diary is the uninvited, unwelcome, and unexpected guest, wandering in search of belonging. Sunbeams elude this figure, hiding behind clouds, leaving a faint trace of warmth.

Like spilled watercolor exceeding the drawing’s borders, history slips away from the viewer, leaving behind fragments of facts and events. The viewer becomes an involuntary guest within another’s notebook, where stories interweave, and narrative threads continually dissolve.