We invite you to a personal exhibition of Sana Shakhmuradova "The Waxing Crescent Myth", at the Muzeon Experimental Centre in Odessa until November. In her artistic practice, Sana Shakhmuradova explores the phenomenon of myth through visual images and plots, as carriers of mythological language.

It is human nature to look for something that one could describe as "truth"; something real about life itself. Stable ideas about the construction of the world and various ontological concepts that explain its principles largely shape our existence as individuals and extend to all areas of the social. Myth as a narrative form has long been a universal and most convincing system that explains the significance of the phenomena and physical phenomena around us. And most importantly - the myth sought to determine man's place in this system, giving him the basic plots for conscious existence.

We can trace the use of myth as a tool for shaping social consciousness at all stages of human history, but can we use myth, its figurative-symbolic system to create new, individual models of the universe, which would be liberating in nature and promote human self-identification?

Moon is a constant cycle of rebirth

In her artistic practice, Sana Shakhmuradova explores the phenomenon of myth through visual images and plots, which are instinctive - at the level of reflex - perceived as speakers of the mythological language, ahead of attempts at formal and rational analysis of the image. The artist inductively builds her symbolic system: starting with the images of everyday mythology observed in family traditions. The author tries to get to the collective mythological archetypes through a personal dreamy interpretation of these plots.

The dominant themes in Sana Shakhmuradova's work are the image of a woman as an independent myth and, separately, mythological images produced directly by the "female" mythic consciousness. The women in Sana's work are an absolute subject who at the same time embraces, "carries" the surrounding space, like a mother, and innocently explores it to the touch - like a child. Of particular interest is the pronounced female nature of most lunar cults, which led to the emergence in modern paganism of a collective image of the lunar deity - the Triune Goddess - which corresponds to the three phases of the moon: the New, Full and Crescent moon .

The myth uses the changing phases of the moon as a comparative image to interpret the nature of human existence (life and death), and at the same time it is fixed on the unchanging, constantly observed phenomenon of celestial bodies, thus finding grounds for asserting its own identity as inherent in nature itself being. The myth tells us that if the Moon is in a constant cycle of rebirth, then we can assume that other universe phenomena (up to human existence) can share the same principle.

Curator - Volodymyr Chyhrynets.

• Sana Shakhmuradova was born in Odessa in 1996. Much of her childhood was spent in the countryside in Podilia region. In 2014, she immigrated to Toronto, where she earned a bachelor of arts degree in psychology from York University. While studying graphics regularly, she later decided to turn to painting. In 2020, she decided to move to Kyiv, which inspired her all the time. Sana uses ink and brush, sometimes pastel, to create graphics on paper or canvas. He uses old burlap or canvas and oil for painting.