Name: Alena Boika
Country Of Origin: Belarus
Country Now Residing: Czech Republic
Title: selfportrait with miners
I live and work in Prague, Czech Republic. One of the most beautiful cities, it is always full of tourists. Sometimes it seems that I just travel through pages of tourist guides. It’s strange surrealistic feeling of my own solitude in crowds of people from everywhere, speaking all possible languages. At least I have learned to live in a fairy tale and to love it, but feeling that I am only a foreigner from nowhere, from the country that most of people even don’t know, never leaves me.
I didn’t think really about political or economic reasons, but one day there was no air to breath and no space to dream.
The work ‘selfportrait with miners’ was done in Poland, in BWA Gallery in Katowice, where I came to extend my Czech visa. Looking at the photos by Jerzy Lewczynski suddenly I realised how these people reminded me of the inhabitans of my small native town of Soligorsk that I left many years ago. One of the women could be a sister of my father…
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