the healing process: Devyatnadtsat'

The Healing Process project centers on a fragment of a work environment: a couch and a bookcase covered in black film, around which the visual fabric of the installation is unfolded. The surface of the couch is decorated with an image of the *old Valve logo — the Valve Guy* — an iconic symbol from the world of video games, representing a human figure with a metal valve embedded in the back of his head. This image, like a tattoo, becomes a kind of symbol of the tension between external interference and voluntary self-change, between technological control and personal transformation. The parallel between this image and tattoo culture enhances reflection on the boundaries of control, pain, awareness and identity in the face of environmental pressure — be it gaming, social or artistic. The “workplace” is framed by aggressive graphics, leather with classical ornaments, as well as roughly stretched skins and canvases. These elements form a collage, intentionally harsh space in which the body becomes an arena for artistic expression, and the tattoo — an act of resistance. The Healing Process explores themes of pain, shame, protest, internal vulnerability and rejection of normative corporeality. Particular attention is paid to the healing process - a slow and painful path of transformation that accompanies the acceptance of a new version of oneself through a tattoo. The installation focuses on psychological changes associated with the experience of pain and the acquisition of a personal visual code.

The project unobtrusively points to the instability and fluidity of structures in which visual statements strive for consolidation, but inevitably break out in unpredictable forms. Instead of straightforward criticism, there is an intuitive tension between the center and the periphery, between what is allowed into the zone of representation and what is forced to exist on the edges of the field of vision.

The artistic language of the project is intentionally rough, "dirty", assembled from fragments: Gothic, careless drawing, deformed classicism, unstable textures. This aesthetic works as a mechanism of distancing, offering the viewer not safe contemplation, but participation in a process - tense, ambiguous, bodily tangible. Through personal stories, irony and aestheticization of pain, the project seeks to expand the horizons of perception of tattoo as a form of artistic expression and support the emergence of new forms of bodily and visual subjectivity - beyond the usual normative and institutional frameworks.