Maria Kostareva’s Stranger is part of her 2024 solo exhibition, In-between.

Maria’s latest body of work, In-between, captures the caesura – a natural pause – of human encounters within architectural spaces. They are intimate moments characterised by an atmosphere of melancholy and silence drawn from memory and imagination. Maria uses familiar architectural settings to invite the viewer into her illusion, while her subjects move through the spaces with a temporal ambiguity. Whilst her scenes are constructed realities, they are sewn together and grounded by her real-life experiences wandering the streets of Moscow, Berlin and Tokyo.

Says Maria, “This process is the embodiment of modern culture, where everything happens at the same time and even one single building in a picture can bear the imprint of places that are, in reality, thousands of kilometres apart.”