Captive to the book

Oil paintings with custom sculptural frames.
Hall 2 examines the unstable relationship between the creator and what she has created. Paintings housed in sculptural book-frames depict eyes, masks and fragmented faces — images that oscillate between visibility and erasure. Here, the book becomes both a vessel and a force that can overwhelm or distort its author, reflecting on questions of identity, ownership and the shifting boundaries of literary self-portraiture.
Broken Trajectory
Installation

The installation Broken Trajectory captures the moment when a prescribed direction is lost.
An aluminium frame projecting from the surface of the image establishes a clear, almost architectural trajectory — an expectation of a jump, an exit, a continuation. The book, however, as the physical carrier of the text, does not follow this vector. It is displaced and suspended in space, deviating from the proposed logic.
This gesture does not illustrate flight nor complete a transition. Instead, it marks a rupture: the text, having left the image, no longer obeys composition or authorial intention. Publication is presented not as a culmination, but as a moment of lost control — when the produced object exits the frame yet fails to find a stable trajectory in reality.
Broken Trajectory extends the investigation initiated in the series Journey of the Manuscript, in which the manuscript, the book, and the text are approached as forms possessing their own corporeality and destiny, independent of the author’s will.
Coral
102 × 102 cm
Oil on canvas
The Team teachable
Sultry Yellow
102 × 102 cm
Oil on canvas
Mask of Mimicry
102 × 102 cm
Oil on canvas
The Team teachable
Wandering Newspaper Ghost
61 × 61 cm
Oil on canvas
© 2025. Elena Shaura
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