“12 eerie tales about love” is a series about love relationships, which are doomed to failure.
As a 37-year-old single woman living in a traditionally patriarchal Ukrainian society, I have grown accustomed to the constant stream of intrusive questions and comments—why I’m not married, whether I have children, and the real reason of my being single. The desire to see the “future husband” in every friendship relationship I have always results in discouragement for my parents. No matter how I try to explain that the fact of being single is my choice, and that I am genuinely happier this way, my words are never truly convincing.
In this series, I recreate the emotional atmosphere of romantic relationships that were never meant to last. I work with vernacular images from my private archive: photographs in which I am posing with ex-boyfriends and male friends, constructing the illusion of happy relationships. These seemingly ordinary moments become the raw material for a visual narrative about disillusionment and social expectation.
While experimenting with AI tools, I discovered that without detailed prompts the programs often generate unsettling, apocalyptic, or eerie scenes. I chose to embrace this tendency, using it to mirror the inner landscape of my past connections. By merging these AI-generated distortions with personal photographs, I create haunting representations of love’s unravelling — tales that feel both surreal and uncomfortably familiar.
2025