About Me – Elena Popkova Art

My name is Elena Popkova, I am 49 years old, I am a Russian scientist, Doctor of Economics and an artist living in Volgograd and working all over the world. It would be more correct to clarify, a photographer, because I use the camera exclusively in the form of a fixing and broadcasting apparatus of a person’s vision from science.

My work as a scientist is associated with the development of a unique method for calculating the depth of the economic crisis – the so-called “funnel of backwardness”. Now I am studying the category of time, where my reflections resonate with the theory of astrophysicist Nikolai Kozyrev, who believes time as a direction and determines the correspondence between cause and effect. This means that it has a physical property.

It was this scientific topic that I first tried to work through through art, having made an exhibition and published the book “Antifragility: the life of a rose” in 2019 in Germany, where the irreversibility and immutability of being were reflected in photographs. All of them are about the life cycle of a rose, about its amazing uniqueness and incredible durability. About the antifragility of a flower – after all, this is a necessary condition for development, where overcoming resistance is the main goal and task of any living creature and every type of human activity.

I confess that when you have a continuous scientific career from your student days, a philosophical and artistic approach to the surrounding reality arises naturally and already forever. This is probably why in photographic works I turn to themes associated with the deep foundations of any science – the cycles of life and death and their visual incarnations in nature. Reflecting on how these categories fight, I created the second series of works “Antifragility: the life of trees”

Trees know everything about Antifragility in my works, they know how to live and preserve themselves. For them there is no end, and common death is only transformation.

A book was also published on this series and an exhibition was held in the art gallery of the city of Cologne.

At the beginning of the summer of 2020, it happened that I found completely unusual stones that penetrated me to the depths of my soul. They expanded my perception of the world, forcing me to think deeply about inorganic matter, the energy-informational approach of exchange and the power of matter. Now I am preparing a large-scale installation, which has no equal in the discovered wonders of nature.

During this relatively short time in art, I have learned to absorb and analyze a lot just by looking around. I would like to show people outside the environment of direct intellectual activity that all the answers and the luxury of knowledge are much closer than they think. Just peer as simple as I am showing in my minimalist shots. I promise you will be amazed. Just do it persistently, do not be afraid of resistance.