PHOTO &
 VIDEO WORK






As part of my academic and artistic practice, I work with photographic media, both digital and analogue, as well as videography










The themes of my investigations include, for example, planetary extractivism, the histories of (post)socialism, and contemporary militarized West–Russia geopolitics and its affective presence in everyday life. As part of my practice, I engage with photo and video archives. Another method in my analogue photography practice involves working with the physical and chemical properties of film to create aesthetic worlds and to foreground the agency of matter. I have experience working in the darkroom since 2024, including colour (C‑41) and black-and-white film development.








Through regimes of separation  


Unearthing the Earth


Photo series, 2024 – ongoing




Details

This photo series depicts various sites of metal extraction and processing, both past and present. It was produced in Finland during fieldwork for a research project on extractivism, and specifically features extraction sites in Outokumpu (a former copper mining area) and Sodankylä (an active multi-metal mining site). The series focuses on mining machinery and infrastructure, as well as sites of environmental contamination resulting from mining activities. These techno-physical entanglements between mining infrastructures and the bedrock are approached through the concept of unearthing: large-scale material intervention into the Earth’s subsurface under extractivist regimes.


Location: Outokumpu and Sodänkylä; Finland

The series is part of the academic project “Pluriversal Waters”, funded by the Kone Foundation


Conversation with the Earth under extractivism


Film, 2025






Details
The movie features fieldwork footage from mineral extraction and exploration sites in Finland (Utsjoki, Viankiaappa, Outokumpu, and Sodankylä). The footage was recorded between 2024 and 2025, and the movie was completed in 2025. The movie's primary focus is the techno-biophysical transformations brought about by large-scale mining.

Edited as a two-channel video, the movie invites to investigate dualities between creation, destruction, and beauty, which are inherently embedded in mining operations.

Location: Utsjoki, Viankiaappa, Outokumpu, 
and Sodankylä; Finland

Duration: 4:21 minutes 

Collaborator: Natalia Batrakova


Exposed acid


Photo project, 2025



Details

This photo series portrays copper mining infrastructure and a mining waste area. Prior to development, the film was soaked for several hours in water collected from a mining waste site rich in sulfuric acid.


Location: Outokumpu, Finland

The project was developed during the Old Mine Residency in Outokumpu and is part of the academic project “Pluriversal Waters”, funded by the Kone Foundation



A body of copper


Photo project, 2025


Details

The series follows a human body moving through the infrastructures of a copper mining plant – from underground tunnels to the ore crushing facility, and finally to the nearby waste area. The journey of copper is mirrored through the human body, drawing attention to the vulnerabilities of those whose labor makes the extraction of ore from previously uninhabitable subterranean environments possible.

From the low temperatures, lack of oxygen, and unstable underground tunnel structures often subjected to explosions, to the waste areas where sulfuric acid and heavy metals infiltrate the environment and destroy organic life – the photographs highlight the entangled consequences of extractivism on both human and non-human bodies.


On photos: Iuliia Gataulina

Collaborator: Natalia Batrakova

Location: Outokumpu, Finland

The project was developed during the Old Mine Residency in Outokumpu and is part of the academic project “Pluriversal Waters”, funded by the Kone Foundation


Through regimes of separation


Photo project, 2026




Details

The photo series was taken in January 2026 and portrays my hometown, Ulyanovsk (Volga region, Russia), during a one-month stay with my family. Now residing in Tampere, Finland, I am separated from these places not only spatially—by thousands of kilometers—but also epistemically and politically, through closed state borders and geopoliticized security regimes. In the series, I focused on places filled with affective memories, attempting to bridge the spatial, geopolitical, and epistemic distances that now separate me from what I define as my home.

(After the shooting and prior to development, the film passed through several X-ray scans at airport security and border checkpoints on my route from Ulyanovsk to Tampere via St. Petersburg and Narva, which slightly affected the film’s quality.)


Ulyanovsk, Russia




Histories of (post)socialism: 
Working with family archives


Research project, 2020 – ongoing



Details

I began working with my family photo and video archives in 2020. This collection spans from the 1970s until 2010s and were taken in Osh (Kirghiz SSR), and Ulyanovsk, Penza, Orenburg, Belgorod, Kaluga, and St Petersburg in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. What began as a project about family history eventually developed into an auto‑ethnographic study revealing broader patterns of mobility and processes in the Soviet Union, processes of militarization, or political economy of the post‑Soviet Russia.


Family photo and video archives, 1970s-2010s

Russian SFSR and Kirghiz SSR; Russia



Portraits


2024 – ongoing


Details
Through film and various experiments with it, I love portraying people and their personalities through visual layering and composition. For example, Pallavi, who has been living in Finland for ten years, deeply cherishes the Indian part of her identity and her experiences; Ebru, an urban studies researcher, whose portraits became intertwined with the cityscape through double exposures; Veronika, whose artistic practice celebrates the beauty of light, water, trees, and natural environments—and whose work I wanted to portray through double exposures blending artistic and natural worlds; Yulia, whose personality I associate with warm yet intense colors; and Vasilisa, whose personality is depicted through forest fairytales. Film photography