Varvara Keidan Shavrova is a visual artist, curator, director, and researcher. Born in the USSR, in the family of artists of Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Polish, Russian, Jewish, Georgian, and Armenian ancestry, she left the Soviet Union in 1989, at the start of perestroika, and spent most of her adult life living and working between London, Dublin, Berlin and Beijing. Keidan Shavrova received MFA from Goldsmiths, University of London, and has been awarded prestigious AHRC London Arts & Humanities Partnership Studentship for her practice-based PhD at the Royal College of Art. She has exhibited and curated projects internationally, including: "Across Chinese Cities: Beijing" at the Venice Biennale of Architecture, "The Opera" at Gallery of Photography Ireland and at Espacio Cultural El Tanque, Tenerife, "Untouched" at Beijing Art Museum of Imperial City and at The City Museum and Galway Arts Festival in Ireland, "Unruly Encounters" at Dilston Grove Southwark Park Galleries and "Haptic Codes" at Patrick Heide Contemporary Art, London. Keidan Shavrova has contributed articles, essays, and reviews to international publications, including Visual Artists Ireland, Virginia Commonwealth University Arts Qatar magazine, and Yale Publications, among others. She has recently contributed the paper ‘DIFFICULT PASTS. CONNECTED WORLDS: Lithuanian artistic and cultural struggle for self-determination as a symbol made relevant by Putin’s war in Ukraine’ presented at the international conference ‘100 Years of SelfDetermination’ at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. She will be presenting her latest paper on Ukrainian and Lithuanian artists’ struggle for self-determination during Putin’s invasion at the international conference ‘The Politics of Memory as a Weapon’ held at the prestigious Museum of Documentation of Flight and Migration in Berlin. ‘In my research I re-examine the conjunction between art, technology, and the state in relation to the modernist avant-garde and develop new models for ‘poetic technologies’ that can present a critical framework in the age of surveillance capitalism. Following the explorations into technology made by the artists of the modernist avant-garde and utopianism, I reroute their trajectory towards the domestic realm, as a methodology to radically re-engage with the inspiration of flight, of technology and of dreams, and to scope the imagination in the state formation processed through a post-feminist perspective.’ Varvara Keidan Shavrova ‘Dreamworlds of Flight in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism’ PhD Thesis in progress Portrait by Marion Galt