THE INNER CROSSROADS

ENG

Yaroslava-Maria Khomenko is an interdisciplinary artist and fashion designer whose practice moves between textile experimentation, social co-participation, and critical reflection on systems of production. Since the beginning of her practice, Khomenko has approached fashion not as an industry but as a social and material language, testing how textiles, color, and form can carry collective experience.

Khomenko is a pioneer of upcycling in the Ukrainian fashion context. In 2011, she founded the brand RCR Khomenko, producing collections from discarded textiles: clothes, curtains, and tablecloths sourced from nearby villages and second-hand markets.  These early works already questioned authorship, value, and originality, proposing reuse not as a trend but as a method rooted in local realities of glorifying cheap luxury and disgust for secondary raw materials.

In 2019, she launched XOMEHKO (Cyrillic transcription of the surname Khomenko),   - a practice based on a technological experiment with textile compression invented in collaboration with architect Dima Mikheev. Thus, objects of practice arise from spontaneous creative impulses, consciously resisting the logic of sustainable, profit-oriented development. In this context, aesthetics is not predetermined, but arises as a result of process and chance.

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Since the full scale Russian invasion in February 2022 she went more into social interaction art practice that combines the cultural and socio-economic questions of the war migration, adaptation, and the processing of displacement trauma, while fostering new communities through collective textile workshops.

The Inner Crossroads marks a deeply personal articulation of this trajectory. The exhibition captures a moment of inevitable collapse of self-perception and the full acceptance of uncertainty as a point of catharsis, reflecting deeply personal experiences and functioning as an act of exposure before the public, first and foremost, the artist herself.

The exhibition opens with a sculptural figure: a high collar ball black dress made from 50 recycled T-shirts, crowned with a shining lamp instead of a head. Positioned like a religious statue on display, this figure acts as a facade of self-representation—in a closed, highly epic, pompous image with a deliberately sustainable message to look better

At the center of the exhibition is a concise, icon-like monumental self-portrait composed of images of strangers found on the Internet. The theatrical pose illustrates exposure without exposure, moving forward while looking back.

The crossroad, a series of nine separate works, consists of compressed landscapes drawn from the artist’s iPhone photo archive, depicting places where she has been since the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Through this work, a disrupted relationship to territory becomes visible. A sense of belonging dissolves, and the idea of home loses coherence. The loss of home emerges as a form of invisible pain, particularly when the physical place still exists but the emotional connection to it has vanished. Other cities appear as formative, depressive, nourishing, and depleting in turn, yet together they merge into a single illegible landscape. Territory no longer anchors identity; instead, it fragments it.

The exhibition takes place at ZAVADSKI, a multidisciplinary space in Vienna’s 7th district that operates at the intersection of contemporary design, craft, and artistic practice. Originally conceived as a lighting atelier and showroom rooted in Ukrainian artisanal traditions, ZAVADSKI has evolved into a hybrid cultural space that regularly hosts exhibitions, artist-led projects, and community-driven events. Defined by raw materials, subdued light, and a non-white-cube atmosphere, the space encourages close physical and emotional proximity to works on display.