Varvara Keidan Shavrova

Dr Varvara Keidan Shavrova is a visual artist and researcher. She received her MFA from Goldsmiths, University of London (2019), and was awarded an Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC-LAHP) studentship for her practice-based PhD Haptic Flight: Feminist Perspectives on Flight Technologies at the Royal College of Art, which she succesfully completed in 2026.

Varvara’s research and practice focus on different aspects of flight, including technological flight, and flight as a manifestation of migration and displacement. She engages artistic and theoretical propositions that remove flight from monopolisation by militarist domination and commercial profit, to reimagine flight as a protective planetary capacity. By problematising the geo-politics of flight in relation to personal histories and feminist thought, she develops new artistic and theoretical visions of flight and technologies.

Reimagining flight through materiality of textiles, fibre-based installations and performative activations, she suggests rerouting the trajectory of technologies towards more intimate, embodied realms, reclaimed through the domestic territory that reimagines flight as an intrinsic part of the planetary eco-system that needs to be cared for, and not the frontier to be conquered.

She completed the AHRC-funded research placement at the Science Museum London where she examined the evolution of Rolls Royce engines and the role of textiles in space flight (2023-2024). She was awarded an artist’s residency at the Fondazione Michelangelo Pistoletto Cittadellarte in Italy (2026).  She is developing ambitious new work as part of the collaboration between _SpaceRCA and Virgin Galactic (2028).

Varvara has exhibited internationally, including solo exhibitions: The Blade at the Dana Research Centre, Science Museum (2025), Textile Memories at Documentation Centre for Displacement, Expulsion, Reconciliation, Berlin (2025), Inna’s Dream (2021) at the Imperial War Museum Duxford, Cambridge (2021). Group exhibitions include Across Chinese Cities: Beijing at the Venice Biennale of Architecture (2014), Unruly Encounters at Dilston Grove and Southwark Park Galleries in London (2022), Earthwise (2023) and CHASMA (2024) at Beaconsfield Gallery London, RCA Research Biennale (2025, 2023).

She received awards from Arts Council England (2025, 2021, 2020), Arts Council Ireland (2021, 2020, 2019), Culture Ireland (2022, 2016, 2014, 2008). She contributed Chapters to book publications: “The Sea is the Limit: We Need to Talk About Migration” in The Sea and the Mobility in the Islamic Art, Yale Publications (2021); “Feminism and Flight” in Re-Evaluation in Feminism and Contemporary Art, edited by Katy Deepwell, Vernon Press (2026); “Feminist Flight” in Postwar. Art and Architecture, Wrozlaw University Press (2026); “Untouched” in Topicality of Ruins, Europa-Universität Viadrina, Transcript Verlag (2027).

www.keidan.art

To enquire about Varvara's work please email: mark@theartistsagency.co.uk