Sasha Zhitneva’s work explores how people construct their narratives and gradually become part of them. Shaping identity is a daunting task: it means placing the short span of a human life against the weight of history, myth, and the accelerating pace of the present. Along the way, fragments are collected that may seem unrelated but eventually form a personal scaffolding.
Her first recognition of unrelated kinship came from seeing her own bewildered expression in the faces of 12th-century stained glass, and a familiar gesture in a plastic bottle embedded in asphalt. These moments, and many others like them, continue to inform the inner workings of her practice.
The work traces these quiet threads of persistence, finding moments of belonging across species, cultures, centuries, and even non-breathing matter. Whether it’s a half-remembered myth or a side quest from a game no one finished, anything encountered can contribute to the makeup.
She works in sculpture, painting, and installation, using hand-worked glass, clear plastic, and paper. These materials, like the subjects she follows, endure, falter, and substitute.
The plastic she uses is always clear, as it resembles glass and evokes cell membranes or discarded exoskeletons—forms that seem structural but are visibly hollow inside. This transparency allows her to create hybrid figures that express fragility and permeability, while resisting traditional ideas of containment or completion.
Her hybrid creations explore how people navigate the push and pull of inner and outer ecologies. These are not portraits seeking resemblance, but forms that ask what holds a person together across shifting terrains: biological, emotional, cultural, and environmental. The creatures and figures she builds operate as vessels for psychic space, emotional residue, and environmental implication.
Ecology, especially its more entangled and unsettling dimensions, has become increasingly central to her work. She is drawn to what endures quietly or re-emerges in unexpected ways. Through the act of pairing materials and gestures, she tries to surface something not immediately visible, a kind of posthuman kinship that does not rely on likeness, but on resonance across time and matter.