Berlin-based contemporary artist specialising in abstract paintings exploring memory & identity
Dasha Buben (1982) was born in Gomel, Belarus. In 2010, she graduated from the Belarusian State Academy of Arts. She worked as a photographer and art director for several independent magazines focusing on social issues, feminism, and LGBTQ rights. Due to her activism and involvement in independent media, she felt unsafe under the Belarusian regime and relocated.In 2016, she completed her studies at the Warsaw Academy of Photography. From 2016 to 2020, her work centered around themes of domestic abuse, feminism, body positivity, and women's health.After the significant protests in Belarus in 2020, abstraction became the primary form of her artistic expression. Her artistic research shifted towards emotions, physiological states, trauma recovery, and mental health. She utilizes painting, drawing, and other mediums such as light, text, photography, installations, and embroidery. She has held solo exhibitions in Vienna and Warsaw and has participated in group shows in Belarus, Ukraine, Germany, India.She currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany.
Photo by Arshia MaljaeiArtist StatementMy current work explores the emotional landscape of memory, nostalgia, and the search for identity in the context of displacement. Unable to return to my home country due to political circumstances, I engage with the feeling of lost belonging—a feeling that subtly permeates my practice and draws me toward the terrain of my inner child.Color is the foundation of my work—a way to access, translate, and hold memory. My visual language resists sharp borders, favoring fluid, abstract forms that echo the ambiguity and complexity of emotional experience.Informed by psychological and neuroscientific research, my work seeks to make visible the invisible architectures of feeling—how memory lives in the body, how home is internalized, and how identity forms in the spaces between what is remembered and what is lost.Education:Academy of Photography, Warsaw, PolandBelarusian State Academy of Arts, Minsk, BelarusPersonal exhibitions:2024 "Little Secret" UQBar Berlin, Germany2024 "Recognition in Colors" Donde Gallery, Warsaw, Poland2021 "Control Attempt" Art Gallery Poznanska24, Warsaw, Poland2018 "Survivor" OSCE, Vienna, AustriaSelected group exhibitions:2025 "What Memory Built In Colour" Pristine Contemporary New Delhi, India2025 “Spanning Delta II” PAKD Gallery, Berlin Germany2025 “Group Show 12” New and Abstract, Berlin, Germany2025 “Fight or Flight II” StadtWERKSTATT Friedrichshain-Kreuz- berg, Berlin, Germany2025 “Portrature Revisited” TAA Galerie, Berlin, Germany2024 “Anonymous drawings” Kunstraum Kreuzberg Bethanien, Berlin, Germany2024 "To Feel" Gallery Pristine New Delhi, India2024 “Re:HUMANIZE” Green Hill Gallery, Berlin, Germany2024 “Wanderings Inside A Waiting Room“ Szczur Galeria, Poznan, Poland2024 'Fight or Flight" StadtWERKSTATT Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, Berlin, Germany2024 “Culterim | Studio Show | Herzbergstraße” Culterim Gallery, Berlin, Germany2023 "Gruss aus Biesenthal"Culterim Gallery, Berlin, Germany2023 "Mind Over Matter" Staromiejski Dom Kultury, Warsaw, Poland2023 "Hidden Actions" Flow Art House, Warsaw, Poland2022 "Connections" Flow Art House, Warsaw, Poland2021 "Gray Mandorla Manifest" Gray Mandorla Studio, Poznan, Poland2020 "Be a lady", Month of photography in Minsk, Conserva, Brest, Belarus2019 "100 Flag", Biuro Wystaw, Warsaw, Poland2018 "Traditional values", Gallery Y, Minsk, Belarus2017 "#opentolive" Cult. Center Courpus, Minsk, Belarus2017 "Art of Female Orgasm", Toronto-Kiev, Kiev, UkraineResidences:2023 VANHA PAUKKU Artist Residency in Lapua, Finland2023 Culterim Gallery Residency in Biesenthal, GermanyGrants:2023 Mobility Grant by Danish Cultural Institute, European CommissionWorks are in public collections in Finland and Poland as well as in private collections in Belarus, Lithuania, Ukraine, Poland, Germany, USA, Japan, Russia, Georgia, UK, Malta, Spain, India