2025
modular installation

Nadya Sayapina’s NARRACJE work consists of two parts. Installation We Were Human. We Longed for Beauty is a tribute to women’s memory, strength and tenderness. The artist invokes the braid as a symbol of sisterhood, solidarity and resistance to violence. Interwoven strands of hair – soft yet resilient – form a structure of endurance and everyday defiance against systems that sought to silence women and strip them of their dignity. The hair entwines a fence – an emblem of control and restriction – transforming it into an expression of memory and intimacy. Each braid has its own shape, colour and character, reflecting the different stories of the women whose voices Sayapina recalls. The installation does not create a single monument, but rather many small acts of remembrance.

Sayapina’s inspiration was Joanna Muszkowska-Penson, a former resident of the Aniołki district – a doctor, a Ravensbrück prisoner and an activist of the Solidarity movement. Her story becomes a point of departure for a broader narrative about the many women who survived camps, ghettos and prisons. The artist draws on quotations from Karolina Sulej’s books Personal Belongings and Personal Stories, bringing forth words from letters, memoirs and interviews in which the prisoners’ fragility and care for appearance emerge as acts of courage and survival.

We Washed Each Other’s Hair

2021
video

The installation is accompanied by the video We Washed Each Other’s Hair, in which different hands wash the artist’s hair in a performative gesture of care and community. The video is presented inside the former Rosenbaum Gymnasium – a pre-war Jewish school founded by educator Ruth Rosenbaum. In defiance of the growing influence of the Nazi party, she created a place of learning that offered refuge to those facing persecution. In this way, the building becomes a space where history and the present intertwine, like strands of hair in a braid.

trigger warning: prison / camp experiences

NADYA SAYAPINA is an interdisciplinary artist from Belarus. She graduated from the Belarusian State Institute of Culture and Arts and the Belarusian National Academy of Sciences. Her practice incorporates multimedia, performance, installation, text and drawing, as well as methods such as interviews, surveys, archiving, participatory practices and art therapy. Sayapina works in the field of socially engaged art. She positions herself as a mediator, amplifying the voices of ‘others’ – the excluded, the vulnerable and the traumatised. She highlights pressing issues, opening pathways to self-reflection, to the overcoming of traumatic experiences and to the cultivation of empathy.