Mark Chehodaiev
Mark Chehodaiev (b. 1997) is a Kyiv-born artist working with site-specificity across photography, installation, and intervention. He studied stage design and cinematography at the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture (MA) and graduated from the Contemporary Art Course at the Kyiv Academy of Media Arts in 2019.
Since October 2021, he has been based in Vienna, where he is currently studying Site Specific Art at the University of Applied Arts Vienna (Die Angewandte).
In 2023, he was awarded the Young European Artist Award Trieste Contemporanea. In 2025, he received the MYPH Photography Prize (Second Prize) and the Theodor Körner Prize.
“(...) I explore these differences in perception as questions of vulnerability, instability, and individual responses to large-scale events.”
In my artistic practice, I work with photography, installation, site-specific interventions, and objects. My work centres around the idea and diverse forms of capturing and preserving moments. Usually, my process relies on engaging with unfamiliar environments. Starting from a particular location — whether my own room or a hotel in the middle of the Alps — through encounters, observations, and spending time in a place, I explore how broader social and political contexts intersect with personal experience and memory.
Since 2023, I have been engaging more seriously with photography, developing my ongoing photo series Hotel Europa alongside my earlier practice. The years since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine have strongly influenced both my life and my artistic perspective. Living outside Ukraine creates a certain distance, allowing me to observe how the war is perceived across Europe, particularly in Austria, where I am based. Here, it often appears as one of several overlapping crises, and not the dominant one. In my work, I explore these differences in perception as questions of vulnerability, instability, and individual responses to large-scale events.
Being part of a migrant community in Europe has further drawn my attention to questions of displacement, belonging, and shifting identity. My recent works reflect both my personal experience and broader social conditions, engaging with states of uncertainty and the fragility of political and social structures.
Vienna, spring 2026
