An artwork by Russian-born, UK-based artist Lyuda Kalinichenko has travelled into space aboard a satellite, where it was displayed on a screen 400 kilometres above the Earth’s surface. It is a remarkable milestone for an artist whose professional career began barely a decade ago, an artistic journey unexpectedly set in motion when her grandmother accidentally threw away the family photo albums.

‘Retreat’ is a video performance by Lyudmila (Lyuda) Kalinichenko (b. 1985), created especially for the Xu Bing Space Art Residency, an initiative launched by Chinese artist Xu Bing (b. 1955). On 8th April 2026, her video was shown on the screen of the SCA-2 Art Satellite, situated in low Earth orbit, approximately 400 kilometres above the Earth.

Kalinichenko is an artist who explores the theme of personal and collective memory. Her creative journey began in 2016, when her grandmother accidentally threw away a family archive of photographs. This sudden break with the past prompted Kalinichenko to begin piecing together her family’s history. She recorded her grandmother’s stories, together they searched for the graves of ancestors and archival records in museums and found old photographs in the albums of other relatives. In this way, piece by piece, the artist reconstructed her family history, family tree, and a chronology of events. This journey has become the foundation for many of the artist’s works, and she herself regards it as the starting point of her practice.

‘Room of Desires’ a total installation Kalinichenko created in 2017 was presented in the main programme of the Ural Industrial Biennale of Contemporary Art. Two years later the artist took part in the biennale’s special programme with the work ‘Artist, Curator, His Friends and Other Fantastic Beasts.’ In 2021, her project ‘Best Before: Unlimited’ was shortlisted for the national Innovation Award in the ‘New Generation’ category.

“Memory, for me, is certainly not a place where everything is stored away neatly. It is more like the planet Solaris: constantly changing, distorting itself, existing in different forms – sensations, materials, gestures, coincidences, smells and sounds,” the artist explains. The absence of memory feels like emptiness. Fragmentation feels like a given. In her works, Kalinichenko combines fragments of recollection, sometimes intermingling them, sometimes approaching them as abstract yet distinctly individual images. The central subjects of Kalinichenko’s investigations are the gap and the tension between the preservation of memory and its distortion.

In March 2022, Kalinichenko published ‘A Book About My Family.’ Within it, photographs from the family archive are interspersed with her abstract digital works inspired by the photographs, stories passed down through the generations, and – most importantly – family recipes. An entire exhibition took shape around her book: ‘Eat While You Still Can and Drink While You Still Can’, speaking simultaneously of a deeply personal and universally familiar tradition: one in which all the warmth and love that is rarely spoken aloud is conveyed through food. The exhibition’s curator, Alisa Sychyova, noted that the domestic gathering in Kalinichenko’s works serves as a metaphor for peace – a world in which all disagreements are left outside the shared table.

Copies of the book were sent to Kalinichenko’s family and friends. In this way, the artist shared the newly gathered family memory with those close to her. “In a sense, I think this gesture was my way of saying goodbye to everyone before moving to the UK, and of insuring my memories by making them communal,” Kalinichenko reflects. Even after the move, she has continued to work with her family archives – weaving new meanings and new histories into them.

Earlier this year Kalinichenko’s work ‘Loop Poetry’ was presented as part of Textinnale in Serbia. This is a series of digital collages composed of anonymous archives discovered by the artist at ‘The Bridge to Nowhere’ in a London park, alongside fragments from the artist’s own family archives. It is a game of rhyming memory – a bringing-together of the personal recollections of people who could never and were never meant to meet. “After moving, the old context did not disappear – it began to overlay the new one. And once again, memory’s protective function comes to the rescue, as it starts finding the familiar within the unfamiliar,” the artist explains. In the collages, the wardrobe of Kalinichenko’s grandmother sits alongside London landmarks. Between them lie black patches – symbols of the fragmentary forgetting without which no human memory can exist.

Despite all the seriousness of Kalinichenko’s investigative approach, her works carry a lightness and an irony. In her video performance ‘Best Before: Unlimited,’ she dressed in the comic costume of a pseudo-scientist agronomist from the future and “planted” paper steaks in maize fields near Ekaterinburg. The artist invited viewers into an alternative world, one in which meat grows in fields and people no longer need to raise and slaughter animals for food. Another project, ‘Enemy Mine,’ inspired by Barry B. Longyear’s novella of the same name, included a video performance in which Kalinichenko struggled with her own memory as though she were an alien. For whilst a human memory holds fragments from one person's life and the images of their closest relatives, the memory of an alien, in Longyear's conception, holds all recollections of every ancestor – right back to the very first.

One of the visual strategies that Kalinichenko employs is what she describes as recursion. By generating seemingly endless repetitions of the same image, she transforms familiar visual material into intricate ornamental patterns, creating a distinctive aesthetic rooted in repetition. The artist traces the origins of this approach to post-internet art, where the circulation and duplication of digital images become creative tools in their own right. These deliberate recursive structures recur throughout both ‘A Book About My Family’ and her installation works.

In one sense, Kalinichenko’s works are historiographical; in another, they are narrative. The result is almost always simultaneously a cohesive image and a process that knows no conclusion. Whether it be an artist’s book that can be read from either end, an installation filled with a multitude of details, or a video performance in which the artist spends hours recounting family.

The locations Kalinichenko chooses for her works are rarely coincidental. From urban interventions and works made literally in the fields to a camera submerged in the bed of the River Iset in Ekaterinburg – Kalinichenko’s projects capture spaces and bring them to life.

And everything culiminated this Spring, her exploration of ever new contexts leading Kalinichenko to create a work in the most unexpected and distant location known to humankind: her new video performance ‘Retreat’ was transmitted in the literal expanse of outer space. The transmission took place on 28th April 2026 on the SCA-2 Art Satellite as part of the Xu Bing Space Art Residency.

Founded by the artist Xu Bing, the residency involves granting its practitioners access to exhibit their works on specially launched satellites. They are invited to create pieces connected to space, orbital imaging, and advanced technology. The project is conceived as a platform for dialogue between contemporary art and space engineering. Artworks are transmitted onto the screen of the SCA-2 Art Satellite, which is filmed by a camera much like a solitary lens-eye. The project launched in February 2024, and since then annual Open Calls for artists have been held within its framework. Between Kalinichenko’s submission of her application to the Xu Bing Space Art Residency and the official publication of her project, seven months elapsed. She recalls the invitation letters as something almost like letters from the future – with lines such as: “We are very much looking forward to seeing ‘Retreat’ in space.”

The age of advanced technology had already shaped the trajectory of Kalinichenko’s works long before this. One of her final projects in the Urals was ‘Industrial Baby,’ created as part of the Chyo street art festival. On that occasion, the artist perceived cradles in the industrial craters photographed from satellites, and wished to fill them with life. Thus, in the midst of an industrial district, a large-scale sculpture appeared – an aluminium head of a peacefully sleeping infant.

‘Retreat’ unexpectedly brought this idea full circle. If the central figure of the Ural project was an infant of Kalinichenko’s imagining, in ‘Retreat’ the viewer encounters the image of the artist herself, moving slowly, almost imperceptibly, in the foetal position. The video lasts 90 seconds, metaphorically representing the nine months of a human being’s existence in the womb. The artist assumes the role of a defenceless yet, at the same time, completely protected creature – an image comprehensible to people of any cultural background. And the role of mother-creator Kalinichenko this time fittingly cedes to the Universe, which in reality unfolds around the performance in all its vastness.

The project ‘Retreat’ in its cosmic context has been available on the Xu Bing Space Art Residency website since 5th June. Where the artist’s enquiring mind will venture next is difficult to imagine in the wake of her work’s journey to Earth’s orbit. Kalinichenko is currently experimenting with fabric. Textile is for her far more than a material. The artist explains: “Fabric is good at holding memories - it is tactile, it retains scents. Through this material, memory can be a shelter, something soft that can be embraced; but it can equally become a flag or a mourning cloth – a sign of loss, of farewell.”

Whatever media she chooses, Memory in Kalinichenko’s works becomes a living matter. It is capable of generating new meanings and strengthening the ties between past and future, presenting itself as an intricate weaving of images – so often lost to us in the ordinary flow of everyday life.