Alexandra Polyakova

A few years ago, around Christmas, I decided to walk from house to house leaving panettone for some of my neighbours. Two new neighbours had just moved in, and one of them was Alexandra Polyakova. At the time, she was teaching at INDA at Chulalongkorn University. We didn’t know it yet, but our paths would cross again later when she took over some of my classes at Silpakorn University after I left.

Born in Odesa, Ukraine, Alexandra studied architecture and art in Odesa, Vienna and Berlin, including at the Berlin University of the Arts and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Her practice moves between architecture, photography and spatial installation, often looking at the relationship between people and the natural environment. She is also the co-founder of ARCANE, a design studio and conceptual platform working across architecture, art and material experimentation.

Photography has always been part of her practice too. Long before Bangkok, she was already making photographic studies of architecture, concrete and modernist spaces, something that still seems to follow her work today.

For the shoot, Alexandra chose Pitak Court in Sathorn, a place close to her and where several of her friends were living at the time. It is one of Bangkok’s older low-rise apartment compounds, with the kind of architecture and atmosphere that she has always been drawn to.

We simply walked around the grounds and photographed her there, in a place she already knew much better than I did.