About

Yulia Makeyeva is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher of Russian origin, based in Jersey, Channel Islands since 2017.

Makeyeva holds a BA in Philology and Pedagogy from the Northern International University in Magadan, Russia, a Level 3 Diploma in Art and Design from University of the Arts London, and is currently completing an MA in Art and Politics at Goldsmiths, University of London.She has been fully dedicated to her artistic practice since early 2020.

Her research and practice explore identity through the lens of memory as revealed in art and craft, media, spoken and written language, heritage, traditions and rituals, nature, topography, and architecture—daily articulations of both national and individual pasts in the present, projected into the future. Drawing on conventions of communication—such as the library and the archive as repositories of knowledge and memory—as well as traditional technologies of memory preservation, she interrogates the power and limitations of relying on the materiality of photography, video, textual documents, recorded speech, artefacts, and physical remains as evidence of history and memory in the quest to “fix” the truth.

Instead, Makeyeva seeks to expose silences and absences and approach history and memory from the position of uncertainty, potentiality and multiplicity, as constantly shifting, dialogic, and dependent on individual agency. She proposes the constantly developing living body to be an alternative archive, an artefact and a source of ‘a truth’ of lived experience and new memories, continually changing our knowledge of history.

Within the Jersey context, Makeyeva focuses her research on the lost tradition and cottage industry of hand knitting and the memorialisation of WWII experience of 1940-45 German Occupation.

Her work is often performative or participatory, inviting the audience to engage through movement or touch to explore the interplay between permanence and transience, power and vulnerability, score and interpretation. In doing so, Makeyeva promotes an embodied approach to history and remembrance as relational, affective, and continually evolving.

Sculpture Backdrop> was exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2024>

Sculpture Any Time.Now> was selected by the human rights organisation International Memorial> and Gulag.cz> via the open call in May 2022. After the opening exhibition in Prague on August 5th 2022, this work is currently a part of a touring exhibition Sandarmoh. Where Trees Have Faces>.

Makeyeva was granted a commission for the pesearch project on the history of knitting in Jersey by Jersey Heritage>, commencing October 2025.

Get in touch
yuliamakeyeva@gmail.com