Your name
Sveta Kaverina
Place of birth
USSR
Place where you live now
The Netherlands
3 words to describe you
Introspective, reflective, dreamer
Why do you take pictures?
I take pictures because it’s my way of making sense of myself, my experiences, and my place in the world. Photography allows me to create something out of nothing, to see what no one has ever seen before — to witness the unseen and the extraordinary hidden in the ordinary.
Where do you get your inspiration?
I find inspiration in the invisible threads of dreams, memories, and fleeting thoughts, and in the way they transform when I capture them. The camera helps me give form to these intangible experiences, revealing patterns and moments that exist between what is remembered, imagined, and yet to be seen.
Who are your influences?
Francesca Woodman, Duane Michals, Sarah Moon, Josef Sudek, Sophie Calle, Joan Foncuberta
What determines the subject matter you choose?
I look inward, peeling myself layer by layer like an onion. Each project brings me closer to the core of what matters most to me at this moment. With each work, I get closer to that intimate center, to my own essence.
What impact would you like your art to have?
I dream that my art could do what the art of others once did for me. Certain books, poems, paintings, and photographs saved me in moments when I felt utterly alone, misunderstood, even by myself. These works helped me breathe, helped me make sense of my own experience. I hope my art can offer that same kind of quiet companionship, understanding, and space for reflection to someone else.
What artwork do you never get bored with?
Francesca Woodman’s photographs
Is there anything you want to add?
N/A

The Three of Us
Project statement

This mocumentary project grows out of a real and often overlooked facet of Soviet history: the belief that death could be conquered. After the 1917 Revolution, some Bolsheviks dreamed not only of a new society, but of a new human - one liberated from aging, illness, and mortality. Inspired by cosmists like Nikolai Fedorov, they treated radical historical upheaval as proof that even immortality was now possible. Scientific texts speculated seriously about resurrecting the dead and engineering eternal life.

That dream did not die with the USSR. Today, it survives in altered forms - in cryogenic startups, in fringe alliances between Orthodox believers, scientists, and resourceful entrepreneurs who see death as a technical flaw to be fixed. This project imagines a world in which one Soviet immortality experiment quietly succeeds. But its result is not a reborn Lenin, as intended, but three cloned girls - disoriented, unclaimed, and uncertain of their purpose in the world they were never meant to inherit.

The work draws on the artist’s own biography: born in the USSR, coming of age during its collapse, shaped by migration and reinvention. The three clones become a metaphor for fractured identity: for being split across ideologies and geographies, never fully whole. They carry the unfinished legacy of a system that tried to cheat death - and never quite let go of the living.

sveta kaverina
@svetakaverina.photography