Quitting Smoking

A long-term conceptual work developed between 1995 and 2022, structured as a visual and temporal self-record. Combining photographic images with illuminated text panels, the installation traces a personal history through quantified gestures, dates, and declarations related to smoking and attempts to quit.

The work operates through seriality and repetition. Photographic images—fragmentary, bodily, and performative—are juxtaposed with light boxes displaying concise textual statements such as “started smoking,” “one pack per day,” “quitting smoking,” or “did not smoke,” each anchored to a specific year. Together, image and text construct a non-linear chronology in which personal habit becomes an index of time, dependency, and discipline.

By extending over nearly three decades, the work transforms a private, bodily practice into a durational record that intersects biography, addiction, and control. The year 2022 marks a critical turning point within the structure of the work. The decision to resume smoking coincides with the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, introducing a rupture in the temporal logic of the project. This moment functions as a symbolic apex of the installation, where personal relapse intersects with historical catastrophe. The gesture does not operate as a narrative explanation, but as a material registration of external violence inscribed onto the body and the rhythm of time itself.

Quitting Smoking, 1995–2022

Inkjet print on aluminium Dibond, light boxes, 130 × 200 cm

Selected Exhibitions

– HEARTBREAK, Galerie Volker Diehl, Berlin, 2022

– Kaleidoskop der Geschichte(n). Ukrainische Kunst 1912–2023, Albertinum, 2023

– Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, 2023

– Ukrainian Dreamers. Kharkiv School of Photography, Kommunale Galerie, Berlin, 2024