AFTERSHOCK
Hope In Stillness
AFTERSHOCK The Echo After Becoming
“Aftershock is not simply an exhibition, but a continuation of an inner dialogue. In this collaboration between Culturally Arts Collective and artist Dmitrii Volkov, the work explores the fragile architecture of identity in the aftermath of emotional impact. Through charcoal portraiture, Volkov constructs psychological landscapes where memory, presence, and transformation intertwine. If Troublé revealed the turbulence of becoming, Aftershock lingers in what remains: the quiet reverberations, the imprints left by encounters, and the shifting perception of self. Each work exists between fragmentation and reconstruction, offering a space that is at once deeply personal and universally familiar.”
Looped
Interviewer, October 2025
After Troublé, I found myself no longer inside the storm, but within its echo. Aftershock emerged from this space, the moment when everything seems quiet on the surface, yet internally, nothing is still. I wanted to explore what remains after emotional impact: the traces people leave in us, the silent transformations, the way memory reshapes our perception of who we are.
Through charcoal, I began constructing portraits that are not fixed identities, but shifting states of being. They carry fragmentation, tension, and contradiction. I am drawn to the moments where trust and betrayal, loss and discovery, destruction and redemption coexist within the same space. These works are not about resolving those opposites, but about allowing them to exist honestly.
Each face becomes a reflection, not only of myself, but of something shared.
A question begins to form:
Who do we become after we have been changed by others?
Leaving The Hearth
With time, I began to understand that these works were not about the shock itself, but about learning how to stay present with what follows. The emotions that once felt overwhelming slowly became memories, yet they did not disappear. They settled into the structure of who I am.
In creating this series, I was not searching for clarity in the moment. Clarity only came afterward, when I could look back and recognize that each drawing held a fragment of truth I could not yet articulate. The process taught me not to reject what I feel, even when it is incomplete or difficult to understand.
What remains now is a quiet affirmation. That everything experienced, even the most uncertain or fragile states, has its place.
That meaning is not immediate, but it reveals itself over time, when we allow ourselves to see without resistance.
The Flame That Knew
I created Aftershock during a period where I was learning to remain honest with myself, despite everything that felt unstable. Living between places, cultures, and experiences, I became more aware of how easily identity can be shaped by external expectations, and how difficult it is to hold onto something true within that.
Charcoal became essential to this process. It allowed me to work with imperfection, with erasure, with traces that could not be controlled. Every mark carried hesitation, every mistake carried meaning. It felt closer to the way memory and emotion actually exist: unfinished, shifting, alive.
This exhibition is the result of confronting those states directly. Not to resolve them, but to understand them.
To remain present with what is difficult to name, and to give form to what would otherwise remain silent.
“The paper accepts everything I cannot say,
and the charcoal becomes the voice of what I never dared to speak.”
Nobody’s Actions Give Time To Look Up What Happened
“I confront emptiness until it bleeds meaning.”
“How can the unconscious, something alive, fast-changing ,
ever be perfect?
Set Alight