Pola’s artistic practice moves between photography, painting, and performance art, exploring processes of distortion, transformation, and the surreal. Dreams and nightmares, as well as the flora of her home country, Tajikistan, are central sources of inspiration.
For her paintings, Pola uses polypropylene paper as an artistic surface. Its glass-like qualities compliment her background as a trained glass painter and allow her to approach painting through a tactile and intuitive process. Working without references, predefined images, or fixed intentions, she enters a state of subconscious exploration. Forms emerge spontaneously, guided by intuition rather than conscious planning.
Furthermore, her artistic and academic research is grounded in collaborative processes and heterarchical forms of knowledge production. Photography, painting, and research intersect in her practice as tools for exploring dream states, fragmented narratives, and alternative ways of seeing and knowing.
Biography
Pola is an artist, researcher, and cultural practitioner based in Hamburg, Germany. Her artistic practice moves between photography and surrealist painting, with a particular interest in dreams, subconscious imagery, memory, and the transformation of inner worlds into visual forms. Her work explores the boundaries between reality and imagination, often combining personal, collective and subconscious perspectives.
She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Gender and Diversity Studies and a Master’s degree in Expressive Arts Therapy. She has also worked as a research assistant in an ethnography research project with photography.
Currently, she is developing her doctoral project VER/END/Wurzelung, which engages with migrant women artists in Hamburg and Berlin and investigates questions of migration, belonging, rootedness, and identity.