Past, Present & Future XII: 2026-27 FF FUND Recipients Celebration

Project Description

“Forced Omission” is a 110-page handmade artist book centered on an ongoing project that explores silenced histories, generational trauma, cultural erasure, and book banning. It confronts the repetition of unprocessed trauma—both personal and societal—by illuminating the historical repression of intellectuals under the Soviet regime and connecting these events to the resurgence of authoritarianism today. Informed by my family history, including the execution and deportation of my relatives and my own estrangement from Russia for publicly opposing the war in Ukraine, the publication is both an act of remembrance and resistance. The book opens with my essay examining how contemporary Russian authoritarianism has helped shape a new wave of authoritarianism in the United States through the unresolved legacy of Soviet state terror. It brings together previously unpublished family archives, declassified Soviet security documents, and the complete “Forced Omission” series to date, featuring 225 oil paintings that reinterpret books by writers, scientists, philosophers, and artists imprisoned, prosecuted or executed by the Soviet regime. Rather than reproducing the original book covers, the paintings deliberately omit graphic elements as a visual metaphor for historical erasure, transforming the books into monuments of memory and loss. Each painting is accompanied by biographical research, much of it appearing in English translation for the first time. As book bans reemerge as instruments of political control, “Forced Omission” traces these acts to their deeper historical roots, arguing that censorship is never an isolated event but part of a broader ongoing assault on memory, knowledge, and democracy.

Biography

Daria Irincheeva is a female Russian-born artist of mixed heritage—North-Eastern European (Russian, Latvian, Lithuanian Jewish) and Indigenous Siberian (Buryat Khongodor tribe)—whose work delves into themes of displacement, political violence, and cultural erasure. Her practice is deeply informed by her family’s experiences during the Holocaust, Soviet repression, and forced displacement, as well as her estrangement from Russia due to her opposition to the invasion of Ukraine. Irincheeva holds an MFA from Columbia University (2018) and has exhibited internationally, with solo shows at the Pushkin House (2024) and Moscow Museum of Modern Art (2019), among others; and group shows at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, NY, USA (2026), Venice Biennial parallel program (2019), Albertina Museum, Vienna, Austria (2014), among numerous others. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Frieze, and Artforum, and she currently lives and works in Upstate NY.

This work was made possible, in part, by the Franklin Furnace XENO PRIZE for Artists’ Books, supported by the Board of Directors, Members, and friends of Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc.