Maryna
Semenkova

Maryna Semenkova (1983) is a socially-engaged artist and researcher from Ukraine, currently based in Berlin. Her practice involves photography, performance, and site-specific work, focusing on eco-mind feminism, collective memory, and transgenerational trauma.

Trained as a lawyer, she has also practiced meditation and psychotherapy since 2008, exploring the connection between personal awareness, ecological values, and social responsibility. Her travels, including three years in India, shaped her interest in women’s autonomy within different cultural and familial systems.

Semenkova’s works constitute complex, multilayered investigations of historical, social, and psychological contexts. Each project requires profound analysis, synthesis of information, and sensitive engagement with themes of trauma, identity, and collective memory. She does not simply create artistic images; she translates contradictory and multidimensional ideas into forms accessible to diverse audiences, combining intellectual rigor with emotional depth. Her practice integrates innovative approaches to performance, installation, and visual storytelling, generating new cultural meanings and expanding public understanding of complex phenomena.

Her work demands high cognitive and emotional capacity, extensive experience, and unique expertise.

After the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Semenkova left Odesa and continued her artistic work in exile. Her practice is deeply influenced by the study of personal psychological trauma, where she identified behavioral patterns rooted in the Soviet past — the system in which she was born and raised. She views the current war as a trigger that exposes unresolved historical layers on both personal and collective levels, which she addresses through visual and performative structures.

Semenkova sees her mission as creating artistic spaces where personal and historical memory can meet. She develops safe forms of presence for voices erased from archives, families, and public space. Her work transforms lived experience and documentation into embodied art — connecting the personal with the political and bringing hidden women’s histories into public view.