artist statement

Ivan Kirilenko (b. 1990, Russia)

creates immersive digital systems that emerge from a personal spiritual framework shaped by inner conflict, transformation, and identity formation. His work is based on worldbuilding. Internal states — fear, desire, belief, tension — take form as dynamic environments inhabited by symbolic forces. These are not static artworks, but evolving systems that react, reorganize, and sometimes break down. External input becomes part of the work. Audience attention, sound, and data streams continuously affect its state. In many cases, attention acts as a decisive force: distraction introduces decay and entropy, while focus can stabilize or even restore the system. Each encounter is unstable and unique. A recurring layer in his practice is Metatypism — a personal symbolic language that encodes emotional and psychological states into abstract signs and circular structures. It functions as a meta-portrait, offering a way to read transformation as a process rather than a fixed identity. Kirilenko’s work moves between inner mythology and external systems, between control and unpredictability, between sincerity and play. Having previously worked in environments that produce and manipulate attention (PR, media systems), he approaches perception as a contested space. For him, art is not an object. It is a system that only fully exists when someone engages with it.