Everyday Death by Anna Kharina

Issue 33

Death seems to be a certain final point of Life, but it is around us all the time on a smaller scale. I am interested in its everyday displays. Only until some age a human being grows and after that he or she begins withering. Thus we are living and dying simultaneously. A human being is such a fragile creation. You pass a knife over a hand and a scar remains for all your life. It seems that in the modern world everything is so quickly that anyhow you should endure anything as you have to move further. We fall in love and we break up even without having known properly each other, we forget insults, we heal wounds, we go forward full of hopes, thinking that everything is still ahead. But as not the whole human body is capable of restoration, a person’s inner world sometimes also appears to be wounded irreversibly. (What if I can't give you a hand of my soul as I have already lost it?)

For me human fragility is comparable with the surrounding world. Most of the time it seems to be constant as traditionally we attach importance to events of our life and all the rest is averaged. But exactly in this daily life you feel that turned sour milk becomes your today memento mori; in the way people whom you know change and in your own changes you notice that “someday I will” more and more often is replaced by “I will never… already». Including, I will never be the same as I was in 17 or in the last summer or even yesterday.

Anna Kharina is a Saint Petersburg, Russia based artist.
To view more of Anna's work, please visit her website