Tanya Fishmann

Tanya Fishmann is a Ukrainian contemporary visual artist and photographer, born in Kyiv and currently based in Lviv.

Her practice explores ritual, personal mythology, symbolic systems, embodiment and transformation. She works primarily with photography and self-portraiture, while also using performance, installation, drawing and ceramic sculpture.

Her work draws on mythology, Tarot, esoteric traditions and Neo-Jungian analytical psychology, combining archaic symbolic structures with contemporary visual language.

My artistic practice explores the ritual origins of art and the possibility of translating basic ritual structures into a contemporary context.

I am interested in how archaic gestures, symbolic actions and mythic patterns can be reactivated through contemporary visual language. Through photography, self-portraiture, performance, installation and object-based work, I create situations in which the body, domestic space and symbolic gesture become part of a personal ritual system.

My work is informed by mythology, Tarot, esoteric traditions and Neo-Jungian analytical psychology. I do not approach these systems as subjects to illustrate literally, but as flexible structures through which transformation, identity, vulnerability and inner experience can be explored.

Much of my recent work has been created in Ukraine during a period of war, instability and displacement. The work is not documentary, but the experience of temporary spaces, rupture, loss and the need to construct private systems of meaning inevitably enters the practice.

An ongoing analog photography diary bringing together everyday observations, portraits, travel, visual fragments and personal moments shot on film.

This part of my practice is more spontaneous and observational, existing alongside my staged and concept-driven work.