Alchemy, Death and the Sacred through Art practice

Drawing on the interpretation of alchemy by Carl Gustav Jung, Yaroslaff Soltan investigates it as a potential model of artmaking methodologies and a source of analogies between alchemical and creative processes. The investigation resulted in drawings, anthropomorphic sculptures, and quasi-ritualistic vocal performance. Later, personal experiences of death prompted the artist to produce artworks that offered a means of coping with grief alongside a very intimate method of comprehending it. Through ambiguous hybrid sculptural forms, animations, projectable light objects, and a cryptographic writing system he explores monstrosity, and posthuman ontology. Mircea Eliade’s notion of the sacred led Soltan to build his quasi-ritual objects, to include shrines, altar-like sculptural installation and the production of a short film. With shadows and ambience, he explores the nature of immersive experience.