Varvara Uhlik GBA

Varvara Uhlik (b. 1997, Dnipro, Ukraine) is a visual artist based in London. Rooted in her personal history and the landscapes of her upbringing in Eastern Ukraine, her work explores the inherited complexities of post-Soviet identity. Through photography, video, sculpture, and installation, Varvara navigates themes of generational trauma, cultural memory, and the enduring shadow of Russian imperialism on both individual lives and the wider socio-political fabric of Eastern Europe.

Central to her practice is the act of digital archiving — a means of piecing together fractured memories and inaccessible geographies. Since the 2014 occupation of Crimea, and more acutely during the ongoing full-scale war, Varvara’s connection to formative places and people has been mediated through fading family albums, online fragments, and pixelated remnants. Her photographs confront the tension between the permanence of digital records and the physical absence they represent, inviting a nuanced reflection on belonging, loss, and the slipperiness of memory — particularly in an age when even memory can be fabricated by AI, blurring the boundaries between truth and fabrication.

In her photographic work, she reworks personal family archives alongside newly constructed scenes, to create visual narratives that move between the imagined and the remembered. In her video and installation practice, she incorporates found imagery, online sources, and mapping tools such as Google Maps to further examine themes of displacement, reconstruction, and the digital mediation of memory. Across media, scenes of folkloric domesticity, intimate rituals, and imagined returns create spaces where rupture and repair coexist, and personal and collective histories intertwine.

In 2025, Varvara was selected for New Contemporaries and received both the Kenneth Armitage Young Sculptor Prize and the Clare Winsten Memorial Award. In 2024, she was named one of the British Journal of Photography’s Ones to Watch and was shortlisted for the PhMuseum Photography Grant.

Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at The Sunday Painter, London (2025); Photo Élysée Museum, Switzerland (2025); European Photography Month, Tokyo (2025); MIA Milan Photo Fair, Italy (2024, 2025); Encontros da Imagem, Portugal (2024); and Liquida Photofestival, Italy (2025). Her work has appeared in publications such as The Guardian, Beaux Arts Magazine, Photoworks, Riga Photography Biennial 2025, Der Greif and LensCulture, among others.