The Clouds Have Merged

Serafima Sazhina

March 27 — April 19, 2026
Gallery "Triumph"

The exhibition brings together ceramics, assemblage, drawing, silkscreen, and animation, interwoven into a reflection on the cyclical nature of both the natural world and the human soul.

Triumph Gallery presents Serafima Sazhina’s solo project The Clouds Have Merged. The exhibition brings together ceramics, assemblage, drawing, silkscreen, and animation, interwoven into a reflection on the cyclical nature of both the natural world and the human soul. The idea for the project emerged during Serafima’s travels in Japan and her visit to the memorial sites of Hiroshima.

Among them are the Genbaku Dome—the only structure left unrestored after the atomic bombing—and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, whose collection includes a photograph of a nuclear cloud. "When I began working on the sketches, I was also reading Ernst Jünger's *Storm of Steel*.

There, Beyond the Clouds, the Better Place
2025
Paper, silkscreen
72×100 cm

Triumph Gallery presents Serafima Sazhina’s solo project The Clouds Have Merged. The exhibition brings together ceramics, assemblage, drawing, silkscreen, and animation, interwoven into a reflection on the cyclical nature of both the natural world and the human soul. The idea for the project emerged during Serafima’s travels in Japan and her visit to the memorial sites of Hiroshima.

Among them are the Genbaku Dome—the only structure left unrestored after the atomic bombing—and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, whose collection includes a photograph of a nuclear cloud. "When I began working on the sketches, I was also reading Ernst Jünger's *Storm of Steel*.

Serafima Sazhina

I was particularly struck by a moment where Jünger describes how ordinary white clouds merge with clouds from chemical bombs and exploding shells, and when the ‘steel storms' subside, he hears birds singing. This reinforces my sense that nature continues to live by its own rhythm, despite human tragedies and catastrophes

Working with sheet aluminum gave Sazhina experience in combining materials and led to the creation of a large-scale assemblage—a folding screen that became the central object of the exhibition. The artist combines different types of plywood—softwood and birch—with metal, transferring onto the surface her impressions of the nature of Miyajima Island, graphic elements of manga depicting explosions, and the blending of various clouds.

The interplay of the real and the imagined, the natural and the artificial, the handmade and the digital, forms Sazhina’s distinctive vision of the ideal. The series of ceramic objects *Little Clouds* reflects a tension between beauty and threat. These forms contain features of the human and the animal, the forces of nature and the artist’s imagination.

Gentle yet harboring danger, the "clouds" become part of a vast sky which, in Shinto belief—alongside mountains, stones, and trees—possesses a soul. The artist tames her fear by transforming the nuclear threat into a living image imbued with a benevolent spirit. Selected works were created within the framework of a joint workshop program by the Garage Museum and the "Svody" Center for Artistic Production at the GES-2 House of Culture.

Curator: Kristina Romanova