“On the Street of Love, the Streetlights Are Broken”  –  Sasha Nikitina

Russia, St. Petersburg in the 90s. Canvas-screens where it’s impossible to tell who is a policeman and who is a criminal. Frames filled with vulgarity and violence; dirty streets and communal apartments where brutality becomes the backdrop of daily life. Along the edges—declarations, taunts, hints. The image is veiled in colorful interference.

I started this project when the shelling of Haifa began. There is no shelter in our home, so during air raid sirens, we sit on the staircase. Thoughts about the possibility or impossibility of finding a safe space through escapism led me to a police series from my childhood — “Ulitsy razbitykh fonarey” (literal translation: the Streets of Broken Streetlights).

“Ulitsy Razbitykh Fonarey”—or, quite obviously, “The Streets of the Russian Federation”. (Obviously, cause it is a wordplay: words “Razbitykh Fonarey” and Russian Federation start with the same letters). The Streets that one can no longer return to. The Streets of memory.

The rainbow moiré patterns, formed by overlapping pixel grids, symbolize clashes between incompatible codes—the misalignment of old practices and new realities. This disintegration of reality, the collapse of what once felt stable, is something I’m experiencing for the second time: first with the war in Ukraine, and now, here.

As a recent immigrant from Russia, I face a painful reassessment of my symbolic capital—education, language, experience. Language, especially, is a struggle. This project is also a way of reclaiming agency. I appropriate and transform signs and styles to create a space where I can speak without fear or shame.

The impressionistic painting draws the viewer in; the Russian-language text, on the contrary, creates distance. I hope the viewer pauses in that gap—between the familiar and the strange—long enough for something to resonate.