ROMA SOYEROV
'Zhazhda'
Year: 2023-2024, Medium: Acrylic on canvas, AR, Dimensions: 60 × 40 cm, First shown: PROPAGANDA, Ilkhom Theatre, Tashkent, 2025, Viewing the AR: No app to download. Open the link provided at the work: an animation brings back the figures beneath the violet layer, dissolving and re-forming with an iridescent sheen, like something seen through oil on water.
Overview
A face that slips away from the eye. The eye is closed: sleep, or something worse? The outlines dissolve into violet swirls, and behind them other images surface and disappear again.
The body reads as part of the space around it, blurred and fluid, woven into streams of color.
Zhazhda means thirst in Russian, and thirst takes many forms: a hunger for knowledge, the urge to help, a plain need for water. Everyone is thirsty for something. But who is in control of that want: us, or the want itself?
A face that slips away from the eye. The eye is closed: sleep, or something worse? The outlines dissolve into violet swirls, and behind them other images surface and disappear again.
The body reads as part of the space around it, blurred and fluid, woven into streams of color.
Zhazhda means thirst in Russian, and thirst takes many forms: a hunger for knowledge, the urge to help, a plain need for water. Everyone is thirsty for something. But who is in control of that want: us, or the want itself?
What's underneath
The hidden layer starts from documentary photography: a person who collapsed at a border crossing, being revived with water. In the painting the gesture changes. A hand reaches in from outside the frame and pours from a bottle over a woman lying unconscious in a violet headscarf, while a man beside her keeps his eyes closed. The bottle is green and the liquid keeps that green as it falls. Help arrives as a hand with no body attached to it, and there is no one in the frame to hold to account.
Before the abstract layer went on, people who saw the exposed figures found them disturbing. Closed eyes read as death, and viewers turned away. Once the scene was concealed, the same painting became the most visited work in the PROPAGANDA show and recorded more AR activations than any other piece. Audiences chose the beautiful surface over the disturbing truth beneath it, without knowing they'd made that choice.
The scan is a trap too. A viewer who points a phone at the canvas believes they have found the truth. What they find is another image of control: a woman held unconscious while a hand pours something over her, framed as help. Revealing it frees no one. It only shows that control passes itself off as care, at every level. Some people scan. Most don't. Both end up caught.
The hidden layer starts from documentary photography: a person who collapsed at a border crossing, being revived with water. In the painting the gesture changes. A hand reaches in from outside the frame and pours from a bottle over a woman lying unconscious in a violet headscarf, while a man beside her keeps his eyes closed. The bottle is green and the liquid keeps that green as it falls. Help arrives as a hand with no body attached to it, and there is no one in the frame to hold to account.
Before the abstract layer went on, people who saw the exposed figures found them disturbing. Closed eyes read as death, and viewers turned away. Once the scene was concealed, the same painting became the most visited work in the PROPAGANDA show and recorded more AR activations than any other piece. Audiences chose the beautiful surface over the disturbing truth beneath it, without knowing they'd made that choice.
The scan is a trap too. A viewer who points a phone at the canvas believes they have found the truth. What they find is another image of control: a woman held unconscious while a hand pours something over her, framed as help. Revealing it frees no one. It only shows that control passes itself off as care, at every level. Some people scan. Most don't. Both end up caught.
The method behind PROPAGANDA
Every work in the series is built in the same sequence. First, a complete figurative scene is painted in full, resolved as its own finished image. It's photographed before anything happens to it. Then it's concealed: painted over with an abstract layer, sometimes fully, sometimes leaving fragments exposed, depending on what the piece needs.
A narrative is worked out for what the concealed layer will say once revealed. That narrative is animated, using the photographed original as source material, and activated through AR: a viewer's phone becomes the only way back to the image underneath.
In Zhazhda a face still comes through the violet, but none of the hidden scene does. It stays out of sight until a phone reveals it.
Color does part of the work. Across the series, palettes mark different registers: violet for isolation, green for ideological pressure, warm tones for false comfort, blue for displacement. Zhazhda holds two of them at once: violet on the surface, green in the bottle underneath.
In Zhazhda a face still comes through the violet, but none of the hidden scene does. It stays out of sight until a phone reveals it.
Color does part of the work. Across the series, palettes mark different registers: violet for isolation, green for ideological pressure, warm tones for false comfort, blue for displacement. Zhazhda holds two of them at once: violet on the surface, green in the bottle underneath.
Readings
In a proposal for the Lumen Prize, the work was described as a trap with two floors. The violet surface catches the viewers who prefer the beautiful version. The AR layer catches the ones who scan and believe that finding the hidden scene sets them free.
The same proposal put the production chain at the center: AI generation, a consumer editing app and a social network, the route disinformation travels, used here to deliver what propaganda hides.
In a proposal for the Lumen Prize, the work was described as a trap with two floors. The violet surface catches the viewers who prefer the beautiful version. The AR layer catches the ones who scan and believe that finding the hidden scene sets them free.
The same proposal put the production chain at the center: AI generation, a consumer editing app and a social network, the route disinformation travels, used here to deliver what propaganda hides.
FAQ
- How do I see the hidden layer?Open the link next to the work, or scan the QR code with a phone camera. Nothing to install: the lens runs in Snapchat or straight in a mobile browser. Point the camera at the painting and the animation plays on top of it.
- What does the animation show?The scene painted underneath the violet layer: a woman lying unconscious in a violet headscarf, a hand reaching in from outside the frame to pour a bottle over her, a man beside her with his eyes closed. It doesn't hold still. The figures dissolve and re-form with an iridescent sheen, like something seen through oil on water.
- Do I need to stand in front of the painting?The lens opens anywhere with a network connection, but the animation is built to sit on the canvas, so the work and the phone are meant to be seen together. In the exhibition that's the whole point: the painting stays on the wall and the phone is the only way back to what's under it.
- Is the animation AI-generated?Yes, and that's part of the argument. The sequences were generated in Runway ML from written prompts, with fixed seed values so the figures stay consistent with the painting, then cut together in CapCut and delivered as a Snapchat lens. AI generation, a consumer editing app, a social network: the same route disinformation travels, used here to deliver what the surface hides.
- Why hide the scene at all?Because the concealment is the work. With the figures exposed, viewers found the painting disturbing and walked past it. Covered in violet, the same painting drew the largest audience in the show. The AR layer lets a viewer undo the concealment and see what they chose not to look at.
- What if the AR stops working?The AR layer is supported for the life of the work, at no extra cost. It runs on a platform the studio doesn't own, so links can break and lenses can be retired. If that happens, the owner gets a working version back: a new lens, a different delivery route, or a video file, whatever the moment calls for. Write to the studio and it gets fixed. The painting stands on its own as a painting, but the hidden layer is part of the piece and stays reachable.
- Is it for sale?Yes. It's a unique work, one of one, acrylic on canvas. The AR layer comes with it: the lens is part of the piece, not an extra. Use the BUY ARTWORK button on this page.