CV

Dmitry Razhev

Born in 1968, Urals, USSR. Based at Lake Balaton, Hungary

Education

Urals State University, Russia
Degree in Biology, 1992

Academic Qualification

Ph.D. in History, awarded in 2002

Professional Experience

Researcher, Institute of History and Archaeology, Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences
1995–2009

Researcher, Federal Research Center “Tyumen Scientific Center,” Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Tyumen)
2009–2023

Research Experience

Participant and leader of more than 50 archaeological and anthropological expeditions, including:

1993–1997: Participated as an archaeo-anthropologist in a joint project of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), focusing on the excavation of Early Iron Age cemeteries and settlements in the forest-steppe zone of Western Siberia
2010: Participated in a joint project between the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Department of Natural History Sciences, Graduate School of Science, Hokkaido University, researching the history of human populations and fauna in the Urals.

Research Interests

Bioanthropology of ancient populations in the Urals and Western Siberia

Author of more than 80 scientific publications, including:

Daire, M.-Y., Koryakova, L. (Eds.). Habitats et nécropoles de l’âge du fer au carrefour de l’Eurasie: les fouilles de 1993 à 1997. Paris: De Boccard, 2002. 292 p.
Razhev, D.I. Bioanthropology of the Sargat Population (in Russian). Yekaterinburg: Urals Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 2009.
Sharapova, S., Razhev, D. “Skull Deformation During the Iron Age in the Trans-Urals and Western Siberia.” In: C. Bonogofsky (Ed.), The Bioarchaeology of the Human Head: Decapitation, Decoration, and Deformation, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011, pp. 202–227.
Sato, T., Masuda, R., Razhev, D., Amano, T. “Genetic Features of Ancient West Siberian People of the Middle Ages, Revealed by Mitochondrial DNA Haplogroup Analysis.” Journal of Human Genetics, 2011, Vol. 56, No. 8, pp. 602–608.
Fu, Q., Aximu-Petri, A., Prüfer, K., … Pääbo, S., … Razhev, D., et al. “Genome Sequence of a 45,000-Year-Old Modern Human from Western Siberia.” Nature, 2014, Vol. 514, No. 7253, pp. 445–449.
Judd, M.A., Walker, J., Ventresca Miller, A., Rajev, D., Epimakhov, A., Hanks, B. “Life in the Fast Lane: Settled Pastoralism in the Central Eurasian Steppes During the Middle Bronze Age.” American Journal of Human Biology, 2018, Vol. 30, No. 4, e23129.
Narasimhan, V.M., Rohland, N., … Razhev, D., et al. “The Formation of Human Populations in South and Central Asia.” Science, 2019, Vol. 365, No. 6457, aat7487.

Languages

English (proficient), Russian (native)

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Marina Razheva
Conceptual, multifunctional and interdisciplinary artist
Born in 1969, Urals, USSR. Based at Lake Balaton, Hungary

I work with time, memory, transformation, and myth. I explore the “in-between” state, using a wide range of materials, from ephemeral objects to found spaces. My artistic language includes performance, objects, photography, painting, and open-air installations. I believe each idea calls for its own form, so I employ diverse media and techniques, always seeking to reveal new layers of meaning.

Education:

2023-25 Experimental Textiles and Tufting Training (Hungary)

2001 Ural State Academy of Architecture and Arts. Faculty of Advanced Studies. Advertising Design

1992 Ural State University, Faculty of Biology (Russia)

1979-1983 Krasnoturinsk Art School (Russia)

Solo Projects:
– 37 solo projects from 1998 to 2025, including:

Deer Country (2019–2025) — ongoing interdisciplinary project exploring myth, land, and memory
Eliminates (2021) — conceptual object series questioning presence and absence
Sieve of Silence (2024) — minimal textile, inspired by an old lake and Bashō’s haiku
Golden Eggs (2002–2024) — long-term open-air object project about transformation and myth
Pangormonium (2008) — sketch of a Never-Existent Instrument
Maps of Peeling Walls (2009) — poetic urban archaeology of decay and memory
Nails Are Like People (2010) — sculptural object series on vulnerability and conformity
Wedding of Tower and Metro (2006) — urban performance about the union of vertical and horizontal forces
Angle of View (2002) — visual manifesto: “The fence turns into a staircase if you change the angle”
Attempt at the State of ‘Between’ (1999–2001) — early philosophical and spatial experiments with thresholds and transition

Selected Group Exhibitions and Biennials:
– Over 100 collective exhibitions since 1998 in Hungary, Italy, Israel, Greece, Australia, UK, and more, including:

2025 – Felismerés, Várnegyed Galéria, Budapest, Hungary
2025 – Frontpage:Next, Athens, Greece
2024 – Revolution and Metamorphoses, V Biennale of Illustration, Haifa, Israel
2024 – JELEN – JELENÉS – JELEN|ÉS, IV International Land Art Symposium, Rácalmás, Hungary
2024 – Crossing Borders, contemporary art festival, Beka9 Space, Slovenia
2023, 2057 – Jump to the Future, international project, Italy
2022 – Myth, IV International Biennale of Illustration, Haifa, Israel
2021 – THE GOOD, THE BAD & THE UGLY Meriden, Connecticut, USA
2012 – Ural Industrial Biennale of Contemporary Art, Russia
2007 – Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, MMOMA, Russia
2004 – New Mythology,International Exhibition of Contemporary Art, Karaganda, Kazakhstan
2004 – ArtKlyazma,International Outdoor Contemporary Art Festival, Russia
2000 – Oltrepassare la memoria, Cultural Association Lameladivetro, Genoa, Italy
1998 – Otto Arte International Festival of Arts, Ferentino-Fumone, Italy

Collections:
State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia

Museum of Fine Arts, Yekaterinburg, Russia

Surber’s Museum für Musikautomaten und Phonographen, Keszthely, Hungary

Cultural NGO ANSPI NEOT, Ferentino, Italy

Underground Art Museum, Yekaterinburg, Russia

Residencies & Memberships:
– PRO SYMPOSION (Hungary), member since 2024
– Residencies in Italy (ANSPI NEOT), Hungary (Rácalmás, Kötcse, Káptalanfüred)

Awards:
– 2003 Matthias Alexander Castrén Prize (Finland)
– 2019, 2020 – Top 100 photographers in Hungary by 35AWARDS

Teaching:
– Sketching Courses and Workshop “Design of Remembrance”, Keszthely, Hungary (2017)

Enigma Travel Detective

R²

During travel, there are moments when ordinary description fails to explain the strange coherence or inner contradiction of a place. Unexpected details, paradoxes, and inconsistencies create a sense of perceptual dissonance, as if the visible reality is missing an important layer.

In response, historical sources, local myths, forgotten narratives, symbolic associations, and metacultural models are used not to fictionalize the place, but to approach a deeper alignment with its hidden logic and atmosphere.

The method does not seek factual reconstruction alone. Instead, it works through attentive observation, comparison, walking, intuition, and associative investigation in order to reveal latent connections embedded within the landscape.

Enigma Travel Detective treats travel as a form of field inquiry in which places gradually disclose concealed structures, unresolved narratives, and unstable meanings that cannot be grasped through direct observation alone.

1, 2, 3, 4 and others

To understand — one must walk

2025, Landscape Intervention, R², Revealed Realism

Total Landscape Experience

11.05.2025

Kőszikla Szurdok, Hungary

There is no gallery, no designated viewing point, and no fixed position from which to encounter the work. There is only a path through the gorge.

Fallen trees, protruding roots, water, rocks, narrow passages, and unstable ground made the passage difficult. The route had to be negotiated step by step.

The walk becomes a form of reading.

After a challenging stretch, we reached an area enclosed by sand walls. The walls were covered with inscriptions.

We examined and photographed them, leaving them undisturbed.

We did not understand the inscriptions. They were already disappearing with the sand. Why write them here?

To understand, one must walk.

A Landscape That Acts

The gorge does not illustrate an idea imposed upon it.

Its existing conditions — erosion, vegetation, water, fallen trees, rock formations, and the route itself — determine how the work unfolds.

The work follows the principles of Revealed Realism: we begin with what is already there and allow the conditions of the place to redirect the artistic action.

Here, the place determined not only how we moved, but what we encountered and how we responded to it.

The inscriptions were not ours to alter.

We left them as we found them and recorded them through photography.

The work does not attempt to decipher their words. It follows the impulse that brought them to this place.

Απουσία / Απ’ ουσία

2025, Happening

Absence / From essence

2025

installation, participatory action, living archive

A reading corner appears ordinary.

A table.
A chair.
A stack of newspapers.

Something is missing.

But the newspapers cannot be read.

Parts of the text are missing.
Images disappear.
Words are cut away.

The absence is not empty.

It becomes a space where meaning is reconstructed.

Words disappear.
Images disappear.

The empty spaces begin to speak.

What disappears?

What remains?

The viewer enters the work.

Reading becomes searching.
Looking becomes interpretation.

The absence becomes visible.

///

Absence becomes a space for imagination.

A place where what is missing
begins to matter.

///

The work continues through absence.

The work continues through what is missing.

The work continues through participation.

///

Proofs of Presence: Living Archive

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TRACES OF THE WORK →
archive & documentation

Project Dossiers

Posolontsy – Salt walkers in Thailand

2024, Micro Monuments, Minik, R²

Monument to Travelers

Installed on 16.12.2024

Ao Leuk, Koh Tao, Thailand

Bioceramics — salt, flour, water, acrylic pigment
7 × 5 × 9 cm

How does a monument travel?

From 26 November to 16 December 2024, two small figures travelled with us from Hungary to Thailand. Along the way, they were brought into contact with places, monuments, landscapes, and sites of cultural significance.

They travelled from Budapest Airport to Chiang Rai, Chiang Mai, Bangkok, and finally Koh Tao. At each stage, we looked for a place where they might belong.

The figures were made from salt, flour, and water — a material that could travel easily but could not remain unchanged.

On Koh Tao, heavy rain began to soften them. Their bodies started to swell and change.

Instead of protecting them from the weather, we brought them to a spirit house near Ao Leuk beach.

There, the little travelers were left to negotiate with the place.

The next day, the weather cleared.

Whether this was coincidence, ritual, or simply the logic of the landscape remains open.

The monument was never intended to be permanent. Its journey, its encounters, and its eventual transformation are part of the work.

A Minik is not designed to occupy a place indefinitely. It enters a place, stays for a while, and becomes subject to the conditions it encounters.

Here, the monument itself became a traveler.

And perhaps the final destination was not a location at all, but a temporary agreement with the place.

R², 2024

DEER STONES

2018, 2020, 2021, 2024, R², Revealed Realism

Hungary

2018, 2020, 2021, 2024

What happens when an ancient image survives without surviving in its original form?

Deer Stones is an ongoing R² investigation into the recurring image of the deer in stone — from ancient megaliths and ritual monuments to contemporary sculptures and accidental structures found in the Hungarian landscape.

The project began with a simple observation: some contemporary Hungarian monuments unexpectedly recall the form and imagery of ancient deer stones. Others have no connection to them at all, yet begin to resemble them once they are encountered through the same visual and symbolic lens.

Rather than reconstructing a historical tradition, we followed these unexpected correspondences.

Ancient Deer Stones

Deer stones are ancient stone stelae associated with the Bronze and early Iron Age cultures of Mongolia and neighbouring regions of Siberia. Their surfaces carry images of flying deer, weapons, ornaments, and solar symbols.

The deer is not represented simply as an animal. Its recurring upward movement, elaborate antlers, and association with solar imagery suggest a figure moving between different realms.

For R², this image became a point of departure rather than a subject to be illustrated.

Deer stone, Khovsgol Province, Mongolia from

Modern Deer Stones

In Hungary, we encountered several contemporary stone monuments whose forms and imagery unexpectedly echoed this ancient vocabulary.

Among them were Tree of Life (Életfa) by Péterfy László and Szerdahelyi Károly in Zalaegerszeg, and The Conquest of the Homeland (Honfoglalás) by Harmat Ferenc with Piszter Péter in Balatongyörök.

We photographed them, researched their histories, and made frottages from their surfaces.

The frottage allowed the monument to enter the work through direct physical contact. Stone became paper; relief became line; the surface of an existing monument became a new, portable image.

Materials: paper, wax crayons
Frottages: 2018, 2020, 2021, 2024

Field of Deer Stones

Another encounter took place south of Nyirád, where we found a group of concrete posts on the grounds of a long-abandoned military installation.

Their original function had been forgotten or was no longer immediately legible. Yet their arrangement on the hillside unexpectedly recalled rows of ancient standing stones.

Were they monuments?

Of course not.

But what happens when an ordinary utilitarian structure begins to acquire the visual presence of a monument?

We photographed the site and digitally altered the images, allowing the accidental resemblance to become more pronounced.

The Field of Deer Stones emerged from this gap between what an object is and what it can become through perception.

This project became an example of Revealed Realism: the work does not begin with the invention of an image and then search for a place to put it.

The place comes first.

A monument, a fragment, a concrete post, a trace, or a surface is encountered. Attention establishes a connection. The artistic act then reveals or amplifies a possibility already latent in the object.

The meaning is neither simply found nor simply invented.

It appears between the thing and the way we look at it.

Deer as a recurring figure

Across the different sites, the deer gradually ceases to be a single archaeological symbol.

It becomes a moving figure — appearing in stone, in contemporary sculpture, in accidental structures, in traces, and in the imagination.

The project connects these appearances without claiming that they share a common origin.

What matters is the moment when an image returns.

Deer Stones forms part of the broader HartLand project, in which the deer becomes a way of tracing relationships between landscape, memory, movement, human presence, and the persistence of symbols.

The Golden Eggs

2002, 2003, 2004, 2013, 2024

2002–2024

long-term conceptual series

What is the sacred meaning of an old fairy tale about the golden hen known to everyone from early childhood? What was lost and what was gained when the egg broke?

The same questions are raised in many myths of the old and new worlds: about the original egg, the creation of the world, the legend of the golden age. Ideas of good and evil and what is
being done on time.

This myth is relevant at all times and at each new moment acquires new semantic shades.

Exhibition history :

2002 — Living the Simplest Thing, Art-Novosibirsk Gallery Festival, Novosibirsk, Russia
2002 — Shakespeare’s Testament, Ural Museum of Youth, Yekaterinburg, Russia
2004 — Tasting Ball, Pushkin House, Yekaterinburg, Russia
2004 — New Mythology, International Exhibition of Contemporary Art, Karaganda, Kazakhstan
2005 — High-Five, Elovoy House, Yekaterinburg, Russia
2013 — Art Objects on a Book Theme, Belinsky Library, Yekaterinburg, Russia
2024 — JELEN — JELENÉS — JELEN|ÉS, 4th International Land Art Symposium, Rácalmás, Hungary

Flying Deer

2024

Object

From the series “Flying Deer”

Place of creation: Great Island, Rácalmás, Hungary, 2024

Materials: wrapping paper, Danube water, Danube clay, wheat flour, rope, clothespins

The work was created using natural materials.

The project “Flying Deer” is inspired by Hungarian ethnographic traditions, in which the deer symbolizes a mediator between the human world and the spirit world. In mythology, the deer is often depicted as a being capable of moving between worlds and serving as a link between the earthly and the heavenly. This image of the deer as a mediator became the central theme of the project.

“Flying Deer” is a work about transitions, about the phenomenon of the hidden, and about the moment of creation. It reflects the multilayered nature of time and space, where myths and reality intertwine, creating a new perception of the present moment. The ephemerality of the object emphasizes the idea of temporality and the elusiveness of the moment, while its ecological nature testifies to a deep connection with nature and respect for its laws.

The object “Flying Deer” at the symposium in Rácalmás fits into the theme “JELEN — JELENÉS — JELEN|ÉS”, exploring and visualizing the multilayered state between the present, manifestation, and transition:

JELEN (The Present):
In the present moment, something symbolic and meaningful is created — the images of deer flying between sky and earth. This act symbolizes the here and now, a creative process that connects natural elements with cultural symbols.

JELENÉS (Manifestation):
The deer, materialized from a simple piece of paper, become a visible embodiment of legends and myths. Their airy silhouettes, as if caught mid-flight, embody the idea of making the invisible visible, the hidden apparent.

JELEN|ÉS (Transition and Interaction):
Suspended between trees, the deer symbolize the passage between different states — earth and sky, present and future. The moon-boat complements the image of a journey and connection between worlds, pointing to the cyclical and continuous processes in nature and culture. They exist in a state of “in-between” — between visible and invisible, real and illusory. Their presence embodies the transition from one state to another, and in this transition, the viewer plays an important role by activating the object through attention, making it meaningful. In this sense, “Flying Deer” are an embodiment of the transitional moment, a bridge between the visible world and the hidden world.

From the Author:
This project, in general, is about the constant movement and change surrounding us. The deer in this project symbolize a transitional state, showing how the material can disappear and become part of something deeper and unseen. These deer are temporary beings that become invisible as soon as nature takes its course. Thus, the viewer is invited to reflect on how everything around us is constantly changing and how we ourselves exist between different states and moments in life.

In creating this project, I aimed to convey the feeling of transition — a liminal state between worlds, symbolized by the deer in Hungarian mythology. Working with paper soaked in Danube water added an additional layer of significance — a connection to nature and to the river itself as a symbol of movement and passage. The deer, suspended between trees, embody the moment between life and death, material and spiritual, visible and invisible.

The “Flying Deer” project was conceived from the start as an ephemeral object, doomed to gradual decay. Within a short time, the deer figures began to lose their shape under the influence of wind, moisture, and the natural processes occurring in the forest. After rain, the deer almost completely disappeared, leaving only faint traces of their existence. This can be interpreted as a symbolic acceptance of the object by the spirits of nature. The deer, made from natural materials, seemed to be returned to nature in the process of their decomposition.

It is interesting to note that the word “JELEN” in Croatian means “deer.” Since the symposium’s location also contains Croatian linguistic roots, I consider it appropriate to use this implicit connection to support the project. The symposium took place in the town of Rácalmás, whose name has both Croatian and Hungarian roots. In Croatian, “jelen” means “deer,” while in Hungarian, “jelen” translates as “the present.” This linguistic coincidence highlights a cultural intersection and symbolic link between the symposium’s location and the idea behind my object. Using the Croatian word “jelen” in the context of our project “Flying Deer” is justified and meaningful, as it not only matches the Hungarian spelling but also adds an extra layer of meaning, connecting natural imagery and cultural contexts with the symposium theme “JELEN — JELENÉS — JELEN|ÉS.”

How I Made the Deer (A Story with Pictures on Facebook)

An Offering to the Sphinx

traces of the work

The intervention remained in the space after the action without supervision or protection.

The future of the golden apple remains unknown.

It may have been taken away, moved, preserved, damaged, or gradually destroyed by weather and time.

The work survives through photographs, video fragments, memory, and retellings.

Instagram publications and video documentation became part of the afterlife of the project.

Realized in the Zsolnay Quarter, Pécs, Hungary, 14 May 2024.

дополнительные фотографии, backstage, кадр со мной, Instagram FB screenshots, video stills, later publications, выставочные следы, process photos.

Marina Razheva

Artist

Author: Марина Ражева

CV

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