Through this endless series, we spied on ourselves, noticing the same pack of pasta, the mess in the kitchen and the soup on the stove. Fleeting moments of life are put on paper or canvas, and therefore elevated to the eternity of art, helping viewers appreciate the everyday beauty, which is not in something extraordinary, but simply around us.

The problem is that there is no added symbolic value behind the works in the style of "my kitchen aesthetics". The artist does not tell us a story, does not express a position, does not offer a special perspective. She lovingly captures the reality around her, as if declaring: "I think I draw, therefore I am." The established everyday life was crumpled by a series of external circumstances and the decision to emigrate to Georgia. The process of moving is associated with multifaceted crises, including a revision of creative strategies.

It is impossible to document a routine that no longer exists. Natasha tries to adapt her approach to the new reality. She summarizes the emigrant experience in the series "Kesa ne treba" (No Bag Needed), which was presented in 2025 at the Nordistica Gallery in Belgrade. The exhibition was born from a “meme” about how for many emigrants the phrase “I don’t need a bag” is the first, and sometimes the only one that they learn in the language of the country they have emigrated to. Interaction with the local community is reduced to small talk at a market or a store. Therefore, in this series, together with the artist, we leave the house that has lost its coziness because it was only a temporary shelter.

The drawings in the series capture fruit and vegetable counters and the hands of people choosing what to buy. Without reading the curator’s text, it is impossible to understand what the works are about; the visual narrative does not work on its own. The images are untied from time and place. These could be pictures from a vacation, albeit diluted with a bit of melancholy. Full-bodied characters are absent, the viewer sees only a figure, a part of the body, but never a face. This adds a touch of loneliness, a loss of connection. In addition to Natasha's usual medium, graphics on paper, this project for the first time showed experiments with ceramics: small sculptures of sprouted potatoes and onions. Timidly placed in the exhibition space, they nevertheless attract attention. In these simple objects, one can find a reflection of the state that the artist and many new emigrants have found themselves in: abandoned, lonely, but with sprouts of hope.

These experiments fit into Natasha’s vector of development as she is looking for new ways to present her works. She is trying to move away from the canons of the academic school and update her classical medium. In the post-Soviet context, the division between classical and contemporary art still persists. In many educational institutions, artists are still being taught according to the standards of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Graduates do not know how to apply their artistic language and skills to talk about current issues and be in demand among contemporary art institutions. Having tracked the development of Natasha Voronchikhina’s career, it becomes obvious that she is aware of this problem. Behind the disjointed flow of images, a concept is emerging, and the form turns into new, sharper content.

Lev Shusharichev: Tell us about your professional self-determination. How do you introduce yourself and what do you tell about yourself when you meet new people during multiple emigrations?

Natasha Voronchikhina: I used to describe myself just as “a graphic artist”, as if I were a member of the Union of Artists, even though that's not right. Then there was a period of time when I said about myself that I was an artist working with paper and exploring the theme of everyday life. But now I have reached a point of being bored with what I used to do, and I'm looking for new approaches, so for now I just say: I'm an artist. I'm trying to make installations, work with sculpture, and still continue experimenting with paper, because I enjoy it.

LS: Does it mean that the material plays the main role, and not what is drawn or printed on paper?
Is there a concept behind paper being your main medium?

NV: Photography, collages, textures, and three-dimensional structures are paper too. And therefore, I don't define working with paper as graphics since it is broader. First of all, there's pleasure of working with this material, the quality of paper is important to me, I like the texture.

Second of all, when I moved to Georgia, I quickly realized that working on canvases without a studio is basically impossible. So paper is a convenient medium for working in emigration, because it can be easily transported. I recently heard an interesting definition - "suitcase art" - the one that fits in a carry-on luggage and can be easily delivered to an exhibition. When I started exploring this phenomenon, a whole new direction opened up for me with art schools and fairs that present art on paper, collectors who collect only paper works.

LS: Let's delve into your past in Ural. Now that it's a completed chapter in your personal and professional life, looking back: what bright and important moments can you highlight?

NV: My life in Yekaterinburg, where I lived for a long time, now seems like a short period of time from this point of view. I'm originally from Asbest, a small industrial town in the Sverdlovsk region. I went to art school there, but I didn't receive further art education because my parents kept me from going. And in 2005, I was admitted to the Ural Polytechnic Institute (UPI) in Yekaterinburg to study construction materials. For me that was an escape from my hometown. I needed to get out of there by any means. Now that diploma is just a line in my resume, because I don't work in that field. Although sometimes I fantasize about incorporating my technical knowledge into my artistic practice.

In 2015, I decided to return to art and was accepted to the Art College named after I.Shadr. It seemed to me that in the academic school I would figure out how contemporary art works and would understand how to organize exhibitions, and also grow professionally. By the fourth year, I was disappointed in this education and left. It was completely not what I wanted. After school, I couldn't understand where I was and I didn't see how I can grow as an artist in Yekaterinburg. I was stuck in post-academic trauma, only knowing how to work with canvas and oil. I couldn't find myself at all either in the conservative society of the Union of Artists or in the context of contemporary art.

A sketchbook became my salvation, I began to draw in it daily and post it on social media. This is how a visual diary was born. This coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, when everyone was sitting at home, and many artists' diaries emerged, prompting curatorial interest. At the end of that year, Masha Sikirina, the director and curator of the Izmailovo Gallery in Moscow, offered to make an online exhibition from my diary. I was surprised because at that moment I didn't even imagine that I was an artist, I said that I was doing it 'for fun'. After the presentation of the project, I had a feeling that I could actually do something. At the beginning of 2022, my husband and I were planning relocation to Moscow. But in May of that year we had to move to Georgia.

LS: You call your creative approach “the poetics of everyday life”. Why do you think that your everyday life might be or should be interesting to anyone else?

NV: The topic of everyday life was very relevant during the pandemic. Everyone was sitting at home in isolation, and my own story became a part of the collective story at the same time. I'm interested in observing objects that then grow into metaphors. But this very approach drove me into a crisis in 2022. I thought that by talking about the poetry of everyday life, looking for beauty in simple moments, I was also expressing my humanistic position, because my art was about how to value one's neighbor and how to love life. But some of my followers who during the pandemic had shared that my works were helping them, turned out to have political views opposite to mine, and my idea of my own art collapsed. I thought I could somehow help to transmit how important it is to be humane through my practice. It turned out that I had taken on too much. It was a big disappointment and because of that I stopped created and posting anything.
Everyday life as a topic now continues in my work, but it's transforming and moving in a different direction.

LS: How emigration has affected your artistic practice?

NV: I had no plan for how I would develop abroad. I didn't even have an artist's statement at that moment, I wrote it for the first time in 2022. Everyone says that you need to be in the context of contemporary art, but no one says how to do it. Now I'm taking courses in Ilya Fedotov-Fedorov's studio, where we immerse deeper into contemporary art, discuss our art not only from a formal point of view of color and composition, but also talk about content. For me, this is very valuable right now.

Before 2022, I had good sales and I could plan my life with that income. For example, I can post a series of works on social media, and someone could text me and buy them in 10 minutes. In emigration, some of the people who bought my work have disappeared. Since then I have acquired new buyers, but still can't live on that income. My opportunities for professional earnings are limited due to the inability to travel freely and participate in exhibitions. I just don't have the necessary visas.

LS: Did you continue working with the theme of everyday life in emigration, and how did your routine change with the move?

NV: It became difficult for me to work with everyday life in emigration. It is a new challenge. Sometimes you spend so much energy on solving everyday issues that you don’t have any energy left to document your experience. On one hand, my film camera helped me to quickly capture things, but on the other hand keeping sketchbooks unfortunately ceased being a daily habit. My life is not settled at all, and it worries me. I keep trying to create some level of comfort, and drawing comes second. This life is more exhausting than inspiring to share it. I would like to return to the state when I had a home studio in which I could work daily. In emigration, this became impossible as housing prices are astronomical.

LS: Nevertheless, your latest exhibition "Kesa ne treba" revolves around routine activities like going to the market, buying vegetables, and so on. In that text, you write that this project is about your experience of emigration where getting to know a new world is sometimes limited to small interactions with salespeople. Without this explanation, and by only looking at the works I wouldn't consider the project to be about emigration. How does the visual narrative work in this series?

NV: This project is an attempt to escape from the difficulties that I have experienced in emigration and observe something beautiful. An emigrant's contact with the outside world in Georgia, and then in Serbia happens at a grocery store. The meme about the shopping bag, that it is the first (and sometimes the only) phrase that an emigrant learns, exists, as it turns out, in different countries. In the process of emigration, people change around you so often that I practically don't remember their faces. There is a quick acquaintance, and then people leave. There are no faces in the series, because there is no one to depict, it is not a specific person, but an image, a memory.

LS: Would you agree with the interpretation that your project speaks about the consumerist and exploitative attitude of emigrants towards the host country?

NV: I would rather agree. When you arrive to a country, everyone says that you need to learn the language in order to understand culture, but when you are faced with different attitudes towards yourself and you don't understand whether you will stay for a long time, then there is not much motivation. I tried to learn Georgian, but I abandoned it after realizing that I had no future in this country. It was as if the language was no longer needed. And I certainly don't want to blame the country here, but I want to explain what is happening in the emigrant's head.

Many people left Russia not because they wanted to and planned to, but because for most of them it happened abruptly, since it became impossible to stay. We had to uproot ourselves from our homes, this is a difficult process. That is why many emigrants only interact within the Russian-speaking communities. And I don't want to criticize them for this. In the first two or three years, you solve everyday problems, and integration comes second. Probably the consumerist attitude stems from this.

LS: You don't want to criticize the emigrant community, but seems like you also don't give any assessments and don't draw conclusions. Are you afraid to take a position on this?

NV: I knew that the people who would come to my exhibition would also be emigrants. And if I had told them right to their face something like: “guys, let's start learning local languages” - then it would have been a conversation that wasn't on equal footing.

I wanted to highlight the problem through a joke and approach it through asking: “Doesn't it seem strange to you that we only communicate with each other?”

When we were just discussing the exhibition with curator Alexandra Kremenets, she shared her opinion that today many projects are being created about emigration from the point of view of "how poor and unhappy we all are." And she suggested that I make an exhibition from the point of doing well, and not from the point of great pain.

LS: In the "Kesa ne treba" series, in addition to graphics, the ceramic objects appear too. Have you already tried working with this material, or did it arise only in this project?

NV: These are the first objects that I have made in ceramics, which is an irrational experiment. The entire exhibition fits in a suitcase, which was done intentionally so that it could be transported in hand luggage. Ceramics are fragile and take up a lot of space. And I'm a complete novice in this, so a novice is forgiven everything, and there may be more experiments with ceramics.

LS: The series was created in Georgia and they are about Georgia, but the exhibition opened in Serbia. What differences between the emigrant communities in these two countries have you taken notice of?

NV: In Georgia, I showed my works not in galleries, but at group exhibitions in artist-run spaces. There are practically no chances to land a solo exhibition. Georgian institutions are closed to us, and in emigrant spaces there is an unspoken rule that solo exhibitions are not to be held. Exceptions are made only for those artists who knew founders of a particular space before emigration.
In Belgrade, where the exhibition was held, no one knew me, but despite that, a large number of people came. There is a supportive Russian diaspora here: there were many reports in media and the exhibition was included in an article about the Russian diaspora in the Balkans. But the local people came too. We still communicate with some of the people we have met at the opening and I am satisfied with the result!

LS: At this new stage, how do you now formulate the range of topics and subjects that interest you?

NV: Two or three months ago, all of a sudden I began to work with the theme of domestic violence and parent-child relationships. This stems from an assignment in the studio in which I work, and the further I immersed myself the more stories I have found. It puts me in a vulnerable position, but I will try to formulate a statement. The theme of emigration also remains.