About
Biography
Ksenia Simakova (born 1992 in Samara, Russia, lives and works between Samara and Moscow) is a multidisciplinary artist working with photography, digital collage, video, and AI. She explores human wholeness within a multiple, fragmented reality, addressing themes of interconnectedness and the permeability of boundaries between the inner and outer, the personal and the universal.
Combining photography as an imprint of reality, AI as a cross-section of collective memory, and collage as a form of visual automatic writing, she creates multilayered works that reveal the interconnections between the human, the world, and the transcendent.
An important dimension of her artistic practice is the lived experience of being a woman navigating the simultaneous roles of mother and artist. By exploring the balance between the inner and the outer, the personal and the professional, she engages embodied and subjective experience as a means of reflecting on the continuously evolving wholeness of the human being.
Shortlisted for CREA OPEN (Venice) with a special mention for the quality of research (2026), selected as one of 30 Under 30 Women Photographers by Artpil (2020). She realized a public art project within the Moscow Museum of Modern Art laboratory (2024), nominated for the Photogrvphy Grant (London, UK, 2017).
Artist Statement
My artistic practice focuses on the search for human wholeness within a multiple and fragmented reality. Working at the intersection of personal and universal experience, I explore the interconnectedness of inner and outer worlds and the permeability of their boundaries. I understand wholeness as a dynamic, fluid state that exists in constant formation.
I work with photography as an imprint of reality, artificial intelligence as a cross-section of collective memory, and collage as a form of visual automatic writing. These media function as different types of traces — physical, digital, and mental. Through fragmentation and reassembly, I create multilayered visual planes that reveal subtle relationships between the human and the world, the human and the transcendent, and the human and the self.
My works emerge from lived experience of ongoing life changes and become a form of visual articulation of this process. I perceive the body as a point of convergence between inner and outer experience. By working with self-portraiture, I introduce a layer of personal reflection and a subjective perspective on both internal and external realities. I seek to synchronize the artist's internal gaze with a distanced meta-position, reaching a fleeting point of wholeness.
Universal questions of wholeness and self-connection are, for me, articulated through the lived experience of simultaneously inhabiting the roles of mother and artist. This condition of duality requires maintaining balance and focus, navigating between the inner and the outer. A female gaze and embodied experience become integral to the works, forming an additional layer of perception and reflection. Within this intersection of roles and states, I continue to seek and construct a path toward an ever-transforming wholeness.
