the Little Mermaid from Shymkent / 6

A series of collage works that emerged from my childhood attachment to Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale. An old copy of the book, which had been part of three generations of my family, was brought back from my grandmother’s house quite recently. The book, falling apart, with children’s drawings in the margins and vivid illustrations, covered in tape and marked by time, made me return several decades into the past and remember who I once dreamed of becoming.

I was born in Shymkent, one of the driest regions, far removed from large bodies of water. Since childhood, the image of the Little Mermaid existed for me as a space of imagination. Having never seen the sea until my teenage years, I loved locking myself in the bathroom and singing, imagining myself as the heroine of the fairy tale, creating my own artificial underwater world.

In these works, just as I did back then, in the past, I bring the image of the sea into a domestic context. All the photographs used to create the collages were taken in the space of a tiny bathroom.