An imaginary post-Soviet sanatorium for endangered species. A Pallas's cat, a lynx, a red panda and a Tibetan fox receive procedures, lie under blankets, attend electrosleep and physiotherapy. Doctor Vrach — a small girl — maintains a careful order while the forests disappear outside.
Sanatorium. Project description
Sanatorium is a painting project about care, loneliness, and a world that is no longer a safe home.
At the centre of the project is an imaginary medical institution where endangered animals become patients. They are looked after by Doctor Vrach, a little girl who does not promise miracles but maintains a small order inside a large chaos: breakfast, procedures, quiet hour, physiotherapy, electrosleep. Her care is not heroic but daily — straighten the blanket, check who is sad, remember the one who has hidden away.
The visual language of the project grows from post-Soviet medical memory: UHF therapy machines, electrophoresis, an oxygen bar, a swimming pool, a quilted blanket. This is a very specific system of treatment — strange, tender, slightly absurd — that existed as state care for the body and, at the same time, as a place of isolation. The sanatorium promised recovery, but you ended up there alone, without your mother, with a shared telephone on the ward and food from home brought in a little pot.
It is a careful, anxious little world, where rituals and schedules become an anchor against instability.
The patients arrived here for different reasons. The red panda is officially endangered: its forests in the Himalayas and Sichuan are being logged, its population has halved over two decades, and poachers hunt it for its fur. The lynx, in some of its populations, is on the edge of extinction — hunted for fur, persecuted as a threat to livestock, losing its forest. The Pallas's cat is formally safe, but its steppes are degrading, illegal hunting continues, and so little is known about it that nobody is quite sure how many remain. The Tibetan fox is stable for now — but the government is poisoning the pikas it feeds on, and its world is quietly becoming uninhabitable.
The sanatorium takes everyone — not only those on the list.
The project holds tenderness and dread together — care that does not cancel catastrophe but refuses to look away.
Home is not only a physical place. It is a forest, a language, a familiar order of the world. Sometimes home becomes dangerous or impossible, and then a vulnerable creature finds itself in an in-between space: apparently safe, but with the feeling that its world is collapsing somewhere beyond the sanatorium walls.
Sanatorium is not a project about rescue. It is a project about care inside a situation that cannot be fully fixed. About a small order created against chaos. And about a question that stays open:
What does it mean to treat a creature when its home is sick?
