Olesia Bachynska
- Anna Lilli Garai
- May 27
- 2 min read
Updated: May 31
Olesia Bachynska is a Ukrainian artist based in Lviv, working across photography, painting, drawing, and glass. Her practice revolves around emotional tension and the darker sides of human behavior—especially the ways people turn away from uncomfortable realities. Much of her recent work responds directly to the war in Ukraine, focusing on how some continue to support occupation narratives or avoid acknowledging what’s happening around them.
Her series "Stupid People" reflects this mindset. These aren’t portraits of individuals but of a collective denial—people caught in states of detachment, indifference, and passive complicity. The photographs feel restrained: faces turned away, neutral expressions, stillness. But beneath the calm is a quiet discomfort. The longer you stay with them, the more urgent they feel. Bachynska isn’t making accusations; she’s holding up a mirror to a behavior that’s widespread and deeply human. What happens when indifference becomes easier than truth? What does it do to us?
Her broader practice moves fluidly between mediums. Each material—photography, glass, drawing, painting—offers a different way to explore emotional complexity, memory, and vulnerability. Animals often appear as subjects, but also as a way of thinking about instinct, survival, and care. She’s interested in how we relate to other beings, and how those relationships reflect our own fears and impulses.
Across all her work, Bachynska returns to the same essential questions: What shapes our behavior? What do we absorb without realizing? What do we avoid? Her images don’t explain—they invite. There’s space in them for contradiction, doubt, and quiet intensity. The pace is slow, deliberate. She stays with things long enough to see what surfaces.
Art, for her, is a form of attention. It’s not about decoration or distraction. It’s about noticing—what’s hidden, what’s ignored, what’s uncomfortable. And asking the viewer to do the same.
