Aliona Pazdniakova
(Belarus/Norway)

COMMON SECRET
By recollecting the old days game from my childhood in Belarus, called “Secret”, I reflect
upon the paradoxical feature of human nature: the desire to both share and preserve,
expose and hide. This game for me plays the role of a key that reveals the confrontation
between public and private, external and internal, individual and group.
Reconstruction of those commonly visible “secrets” interplays here with a key passage of
the phenomenological philosophy: we can never see into another person’s mind. In the
light of the confused world, this work is a search for a possibility of transparency and
access to the other.

Aliona Pazdniakova is an interdisciplinary artist. Belarusian by origin, since 2010 she lives and works in Oslo, Norway. Her background consists of education in traditional arts (MA), philosophy (BA) and photography. She is a member of The Norwegian Association of Fine Art Photographers (FFF). Mainly based on media of photography, video and text, her works often take hybrid shapes and manifest themselves in forms of transgressive research. Her main focus is shifting from the figure of the Other towards the theme of collective identity and mechanisms of its construction, which she tries to reveal through the combination of philosophical theories and visual experience. In her artistic practice she is using both digital and analogue techniques, combining staged and documentary approaches, mixing genres and experimenting with styles. Being fascinated by the origin of things Aliona is often in a dialogue with antiquity and traditional cultures, striving to decode and visualise new ethic and aesthetic standards as well as principles behind contemporary mythologies.