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.
“(...) my work explores how movement intersects with something personal and human.”
In my artistic practice, I work with installation, intervention, objects, and photography. Many of my works are site-specific — they are embedded in the context of a distinct place. Some exist only briefly, tied to a particular moment or occasion.
In my process, I use found materials — furniture, fragments of walls, abandoned or broken things, textiles — as well as found places and encounters captured with my camera; I reposition existing objects and materials, combine them with other elements, alter them, or intervene directly in an existing site.
I explore how the self, both my own and that of other people, engages with environments we inhabit — moving between places, finding oneself in unfamiliar sites or situations and finding one’s personal relation to a place — whether it is in our own room or in a hotel in the middle of the Alps. In this way, my work explores how movement intersects with something personal and human. Whether it is moving across countries — from Kyiv to Vienna — or changing rooms within the cities, this migratory state has further drawn my attention to questions of displacement, belonging, and shifting identity.
The years since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine have strongly influenced both my personal life and artistic process. Living abroad allows me to observe how the war in Ukraine is perceived from a distance. Here, in Austria, where I am based, it appears as just one of several overlapping crises, while in Ukraine it is the dominant one. These observations raise questions of vulnerability, instability, and individual responses to large-scale events that I try to explore through my work.
August of 2026
