Sveta Kaverina
The Netherlands
Biography
Sveta Kaverina (b. 1977, former USSR) lives and works in Haarlem and is a visual artist working with photography, video, and text. With a background in cultural studies and a PhD in philosophy, she previously worked as a political journalist in Moscow before relocating to the UK in 2014 and settling in the Netherlands in 2021.
Her practice explores presence and absence, memory, mortality, and fractured identities, navigating the space between documentary, poetic, and performative approaches. Artist books are central to her work, with projects shortlisted for the Dummy Award, PhotoEspaña, and Encontros da Imagem.
Her work has been gaining increasing international visibility, including selections for the Biennale della Fotografia Femminile in Mantova, a first-place award at the World Biennial of Student Photography in Novi Sad, and a Dutch Talent Grant supporting her upcoming exhibition at the Rotterdam Photo Festival.
Project
“The Three of Us” by Sveta Kaverina is a poetically conceived photographic mockumentary project that reimagines a forgotten thread of Soviet-era history — the belief that death could be overcome by science following the 1917 Revolution. Drawing on archival speculation about immortality and early radical scientific thought, the series imagines a clandestine experiment that fails to resurrect Lenin but instead produces three cloned girls who are never embraced by the system that created them.
Rooted in Kaverina’s own biography the work uses these fictional figures as metaphors for fractured identities, dislocation and the invisible legacies of vanished ideologies. By blending historical context with speculative narrative and staged imagery, The Three of Us reflects on how collapsed systems continue to shape individual lives and inner worlds long after their political demise.
