'In my childhood, I often heard you are not beautiful, you are pretty’ says Odessa-born Svitlana Levchenko and continues ‘I grew up with this knowledge and it became an indisputable axiom.’
In most cultures today, women are defined by their external beauty and the perception of female identity is being continuously distorted by a complex set of traditions, expectations, stereotypes and taboos. As women, we perceive how we’re being perceived and subconsciously impose outside limitations on our bodies and inner selves. In her recent work YatFTIL (You Are The Fear That I Lost) Odesssa-born Svitlana Levchenko looks deeper into these self-imposed prisons we create for ourselves through a series of visual metaphors and self-portraits.
