Polina Davydenko (*1995) is an artist who works across photography, video, and installation. She graduated from the Photography Studio led by Ivars Gravlejs and the Environment Studio led by Barbora Klímová and Matěj Smetana at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Brno University of Technology, where she currently lives and works.

In her current work, she primarily explores themes of home, memory, and everyday life as they transform under the pressure of wartime events, which she also covers as a war correspondent. She is interested in narrative in forms such as personal testimony, documentation, traces, and the transformation of places marked by history. She sensitively observes the relationships between people, their pasts, the memory of the landscape, and cultural stereotypes, from which she constructs layered, often unsettling visual contexts.

In her work, Davydenko perceptively intertwines artistic research, activism, and personal storytelling. Her works preserve memories while also capturing accounts of a reality that has become everyday life for people.

She is a member of the organization Resistance Support Club, a collective of artists and activists that was founded as an initiative to support the defense of the Ukrainian population and animals living in endangered areas.

The exhibition is held at the intimate gallery Na bidýlku II, which is part of the permanent exhibition 20th-Century Czech Art and Its Boxes. Here, the GMU presents the work of the youngest generation of artists, current students, and graduates from art school studios. Its title and focus refer to the work of gallerist Karel Tutsch, whose collection was acquired by GMU in 2021. 

curator: Anna Horák Zemanová