10 dogs,10 cats
and a unicorn

Adriana Shportan
Solo Exhibition

10 dogs, 10 cats and a unicorn is a journey that does not abide by the laws of conventional time. The exhibition unfolds across two parallel layers: a child’s imitation and imagination of the adult world, and an adult’s return to childhood, where memory has been fragmented by migration, trauma, and structure, leaving behind spaces of absence.

Working from fragments of her childhood, Adriana returns to a recurring figure: a child-self, rendered with quiet specificity, at times without a face. The body, the scene, the light may be reconstructed, but the face resists, the residue of a life interrupted before it could fully take form.

Through these fragments, the viewer may not share their history but there is something that draws recognition. Adriana’s paintings act not as a shared narrative but a resonance that we are all, in some sense, in transit, and that the face the world eventually gives us is never quite our own.

10 dogs, 10 cats and a unicorn.

The simple dream of a life before interruption.

About Adriana Shportan

Adriana Shportan is a Ukrainian visual artist originally from the Pechorna village in Ternopil region. She holds a degree in fashion design from Kyiv National University of Technologies and Design. Since the beginning of the full-scale war, has been living and working in London.

Her practice explores the formation of identity through the interaction of external circumstances, collective memory, and personal experience. Her works construct a space between memory and imagined imagery, where fragments of recollection intertwine with dreamlike motifs or inner visions. Through these hybrid states, she traces the dynamics of internal transformations — their fragility, velocity, and potential force.

Instagram: @nenza.adri

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