Stefania Smolkina’s research-based works examine the texture of memory. Each of her projects grows out of ongoing interest in the political drama of unmentioned, overlooked, and overshadowed stories. She is interested in how subjective fragments can convey the experience of time and era outside of officially recorded history or ideology. She thinks her films and installations as moving paintings, with documentary backgrounds, yet composed and arranged as fictive scenes. Viewing the found materials through the prism of cinema, she creates poetic works that aim to un-archive the past.

Smolkina studied at the Saint Petersburg Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design, at the Leipzig Academy of Visual Arts with Clemens von Wedemeyer and Tina Bara, at the Iceland University of the Arts in Reykjavík and at Werkleitz PMMC for Documentary Practice in Halle (Saale). 

Her work has been shown in cinemas, galleries, and institutions, including the Goethe-Institut Boston and Ireland, Diagonale ’24 Graz, the 70th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, DOCK 20 – Kunstraum und Sammlung Hollenstein, Kunstraum Kreuzberg Berlin, D21 Leipzig, transmediale studio at silent green Kulturquartier Berlin, Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz – Henry van de Velde Museum, PROYECTOR ’20 / Festival de Videoarte Madrid, and Algera Studio Reykjavík.


In 2021 Smolkina started teaching at the Abendakademie of the HGB Leipzig and since then has independently accompanied various projects at the edges of the genre of documentary. She is part of the initiative Kino in Bewegung, Leipzig and The Emerging Eye Network, Berlin.