Your name
Irina Shkoda
Place of birth
Kiev, Ukraine
Place where you live now
Paris, France
3 words to describe you
Apostle, sinner, child
Why do you take pictures?
Even though I am drawn to multiple mediums and have experimented with sound, it is photography - positioned between contemporary art and cinema - that fascinates me the most. I am deeply affected by projects that unfold through sequences of images and texts, where the context is only partially revealed, leaving space for individual perception. This way of thinking through visual fragments has shaped my approach. Photography, for me, is a way to work within that tension - between what is shown and what is withheld. Photography is also a space that allows for a full aesthetic spectrum, stretching from pure abstraction to raw documentary. What fascinates me is the way photography can operate within this tension - how it can hold an almost mystical, symbolic aesthetic while still maintaining a direct, undeniable connection to the real. This delicate balance is something I struggle to find in other mediums.
Where do you get your inspiration?
My primary references do not come from visual arts, but from philosophy. My work is deeply influenced by thinkers such as Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, whose reflections on radical alterity, hospitality, and responsibility resonate profoundly with me. I also engage with Deleuze and Guattari, though I do not fully align with their philosophy. Their ideas provoke a friction in my thoughts, creating a kind of productive dissonance that translates into my images. I am not interested in illustrating theories, but in feeling their weight and testing their limits through visual language. Alongside these, psychoanalytic thought has played a crucial role in shaping my understanding of subjectivity, perception, and language. Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva, in particular, have influenced my approach to the symbolic, to the structures that shape meaning, and to the threshold between the semiotic and the symbolic.
Who are your influences?
I have always been drawn to the radical simplicity of 1960s and 70s minimalism, particularly Lucio Fontana. His radical and simple act of cutting into the canvas is both a destruction and a revelation, a gesture so precise it becomes absolute. In photography, I admire Torbjørn Rødland for the way he navigates between the sacred and violence contrasting it with the calm Nordic aesthetic.
 At one point, Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ had a strong impact on me: it is an iconoclastic work made by someone who determines himself as deeply religious, and this paradox is essential. 
 Viviane Sassen’s use of color and composition also speaks to me — her way of constructing images as a painter would, pushing photography toward abstraction, is something I am exploring in my own practice.
What determines the subject matter you choose?
My work is rooted in introspection. It is through deep, personal experience that I connect with broader themes, rather than through direct engagement with current events. My approach is poetic, psychoanalytic, and apophatic - I conceal part of what I want to say, creating an absence that allows space for the viewer’s own interpretation. My images do not function as direct statements but as fragments, oscillating between revelation and silence.
What impact would you like your art to have?
My work is first and foremost a personal necessity - an attempt to understand, to process, to make something visible that exists on the threshold of language. But when an image resonates with someone, when it finds an echo in their own experience, that moment of recognition feels profoundly meaningful. If my work can open a space for shared ambiguity, for something unresolved yet deeply felt, then it has done what it needed to do.
What artwork do you never get bored with?
After experiencing emigration and heightened insecurity, I’ve come to realize that what fascinates me the most is actually popular art - especially stories for children, fairy tales, and animated films. They resonate with me on a deeper level than conceptual or contemporary art ever could. Perhaps it is the child within me that ultimately decides what moves me the most. If I had to name one work, it would be Kiki’s Delivery Service by Hayao Miyazaki.
Is there anything you want to add?
After all, art is a side effect of existence. What truly matters to me is to immerse myself in life and live it fully - with all the seemingly banal moments that weave the fabric of the everyday.

Miserere
Project statement

As a child, I was to read the psalm of David twice a day, morning and evening, according to the prayer rule.

Then I felt my personhood through pain: “...the subject (since Christianity) is the one who suffers. Where there is a wound, there is a subject” says Roland Barthes in A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments. Now I am reviewing my memories from new perspetives. But no new self-definition (for example, atheist; feminist; spectator) takes me completely out of the Christian paradigm, where agency derives from pain and trauma.

God, as a projection of my rejecting father, made me want to attract attention through sin. The very word “sin” has always had a sexual connotation for me. From the text of the New Testament I learned that God did not come to the righteous, but sinners, and this determined the strategy of my behaviour for many years. Mary Magdalene became an example I would follow as a woman who lived outside of taboos. Sin was interpreted by me as rebellion, new sincerity, and the right to subjectivity.

In this project, I decided to recreate some significant events from my life through photography, to look at them from the outside, as does God who I don’t believe in. Each frame corresponds to both a traumatic memory and a verse from the psalm.

irina shkoda
@penitentsinner