HARD LUX! is a personal art project reflecting on industrial life, physical labor, and generational migration through the artist’s own experience and memory. The exhibition is rooted in years of observing factory spaces — carpentry workshops, welding shops, and foundries — where labor becomes both the foundation of society and a source of exhaustion. Growing up between the industrial cities of Kryvyi Rih, Zelenodolsk, and Mariupol, the artist developed a visual language shaped by manual work, social instability, and the ongoing need to preserve creativity under difficult conditions.

 

The project explores how different political and economic systems — from industrial socialism to contemporary capitalism — often reduce human talent to survival labor. At its center are people with creative and intellectual potential: engineers, musicians, teachers, architects, and artists whose abilities remain unused while they work physically demanding and low-paid jobs. Through images connected to industrial environments and everyday labor, the exhibition reflects on repeating social patterns in which entire lives are spent supporting systems of wealth and inequality. The title HARD LUX! points to the contrast between the comfort of some and the physical burden carried by others.

 

Migration is another key layer of the project. The exhibition follows several generations of one family, from unrealized dreams of leaving abroad to contemporary migration across Europe. Personal history becomes part of a wider social experience shared by many families in Eastern Europe. Combining industrial aesthetics with emotional memory and documentary observation, the project creates space for reflection on labor, displacement, dignity, and the search for personal freedom.