SASHA
SLEPCHUK

Tanya — mixed-media installation, 2025

Tanya Bed sheet, paper, tracing paper, found pillowcases, found photographs, wood Sheet 181 × 135 cm, pillowcase 1 35 × 45 cm, pillowcase 2 40 × 50 cm, pillowcase 3 30 × 40 cm 2025 Reliquarium. Solo show, MeMeraki artist residency, Limassol

At the core of Tanya is a borrowed notebook that belonged to a woman named Tatiana. Scans of all its pages are printed across a bedsheet: notes on everyday tasks, lists, phone numbers, and other ordinary records come together as a document of private life. At the centre is a text Tatiana wrote during her father’s funeral service – an address to him in which she asks for forgiveness and promises to complete what had been left unfinished. The project continues with a series of old pillowcases bearing images of the notebook’s cover, endpaper, and first pages. Inside are found photographs, concealed beneath the fabric like furniture covered with sheets in a house left unoccupied for a long time. The pillowcases remain intact as functional domestic objects: they have not been cut and can be removed from the frames and used as intended. Open pockets allow the photographs to be taken out, rearranged, or replaced with personal images, creating a different constellation each time. The form and colour of the work refer to old maps in which paper was mounted onto fabric. Here, the personal archive similarly becomes a kind of map of a life already lived, while the bedsheet and pillowcases – objects directly connected to the body, the home, and intimate space – become carriers of another person’s notes and photographs. The project brings together the documentary nature of a found archive with the possibility of extending it: viewers can add their own images to the system and introduce their own histories into it.

Tanya, installation view

Tanya, pillowcase Found pillowcase, found photographs 2025

Tanya, detail

Tanya, pillowcase Found pillowcase, found photographs 2025

Tanya, detail

Tanya, pillowcase Found pillowcase, found photographs 2025

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