"VARIATIONS OF THE SCREAM"
Self-portrait series, 2025
How can we visualize a scream that never escapes the lips one that resonates only inside the body?
In this conceptual and deeply personal series of five experimental self-portraits, Oxana Guryanova explores the silent, internalized forms of emotional rupture. Drawing inspiration from Edvard Munch’s iconic painting The Scream, she translates its existential anxiety into a contemporary visual language - shaped by her own experiences of grief, fear, disintegration, and longing.
Created in the aftermath of personal collapse - the sudden loss of her father, the emotional toll of war, and a painful separation — each portrait reflects a different state of inner tension. These are not theatrical expressions, but quiet visual echoes of a voice breaking inside.
Working with diverse photographic techniques, including flatbed scanning, digital exposure, analog Polaroid, and digital collage — Guryanova approaches the same inner scream from five distinct aesthetic and emotional angles. The result is a layered and intimate visual research: a study of what happens to the scream when it is trapped.
This series does not aim to imitate Munch’s painting. Instead, it resonates with his questions: What is the shape of invisible pain? Can inner chaos be seen — and if so, how?
Variations of the Scream is both a reflection and a release — a project about the fragile boundaries between presence and absence, between image and emotion.
