Misplaced Enthusiasm, 2025

This work is a part of 'Palimpsest' show, a collection of mixed media collages that act as a record of memory, presence, and absence. Interweaving fragments of personal and collective stories, the exhibition explores the shifting patterns between us and the fragile traces that remain.

This work features original letters written by children to the Soviet magazine Kostyor (“Bonfire”) — a state publication for the “young pioneers” that ran from 1936 onwards. At its peak, it reached millions of young readers across the Soviet Union, shaping the imagination of several generations — a curious blend of propaganda, education, and genuine youthful (misplaced) enthusiasm.These particular letters were sent in the mid-1980s, when I was a child too. My grandmother’s job was to respond to them, and her handwritten red corrections and editorial notes can still be seen.


The letters were never really to anyone; they were feeding the socialist machine of encouragement and reporting, half confessional, half performance, scraps of faith and bureaucracy. These artefacts escaped. The “purpose” has inverted: from discipline and collective pride - to absurd relic - to my playground material.

Sometimes I think about those kids — they’d be my age now. Who are they, where did life take them, what do they believe in? Some wrote about the war their grandparents fought — the same places now torn apart again, in ways none of us in 1985 could have imagined…