Omphaloskepsis II Print

Diana was born on April 26th 1990 in a small town called Arkalyk in the north of Kazakhstan. She is the only child in a family of a metallurgist at a lead manufacturing plant and a pediatrician. Her craving for drawing began to manifest itself from an early age, alas, this desire was not satisfied by attending ordinary art classes. At the age of 7, after her parents’ divorce, she moved to Almaty to live with her grandfather, a former sailor of the Baltic Fleet, who was mainly involved in the upbringing of the future artist. Studying at the local Secondary School № 97 was easy, Diana attended school regularly, but with a great aversion, the only thing she liked were Russian Literature, History and Geography. At the age of 16, she got her first job as a linesman (line judge) at tennis tournaments organized by the Kazakhstan Tennis Federation, where she continued to work for 5 years while studying. During this time, still without realizing her vocation in art, she entered Turan University for a Bachelor of Science degree in Hospitality Business Management, a choice made on impulse and completely unconsciously. Despite her good academic performance, Diana was very selective in the subjects she was forced to study, preferring to read on the sly the works of existentialists during lectures on Toponymy and Cartography. After graduating from her bachelor's degree in 2012, without any enthusiasm, she received a grant to study for a Master’s of Science degree in Hospitality and Entrepreneurship in Tourism at Turan University, which she later regarded as a manifestation of escapism. Over the next few years, a passion for photography emerged along with her painting. With creativity remaining in the background, attempts to work in an office and “be like everyone else” came to the fore. Despite her efforts, Diana felt more and more like a foreign body, which is constantly rejected and completely disgusted with everything related to an office environment. Just a year before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Diana quit her last job, and deliberately doomed herself to social death and seclusion in order to come to grips with her creative practice and self-education. Until 2021 all of Diana’s art were created without any hope of presenting them to the general public in the foreseeable future due to high self-criticism and self-doubt, and her creative path was periodically interrupted by the desire to quit everything and give up.