Jana Nizovtseva
Jana Nizovtseva was born and raised in Minsk, Belarus, and currently lives and works in Warsaw, Poland. She studied virtual environment design and has professional experience in various fields of design, including graphic design, print production, 3D, and product development. In her artistic practice, Jana works with photography and other image-based media, exploring themes of memory, identity, and belonging. Her projects often emerge from observations, questions, and engagement with materials rather than from a predetermined form. Through experimentation with images, archives, and different approaches to visual storytelling, she creates projects that examine how personal and collective experiences are preserved, transformed, and reinterpreted over time. Jana participated in the PhotoArtDoc mentorship program in 2024 and the Do Art Together mentorship program in Warsaw in 2025.
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Hands Are Freezing
Hands Are Freezing is an ongoing project that emerged after the death of my father.
The title comes from the only words I heard from him after his death. In a dream, he said: “Hands are freezing.” The phrase became a point of entry into reflections on memory, absence, and the ways relationships continue to exist after someone is gone.
I am unable to return to Belarus and was not present at either my father’s cremation or the later burial of his ashes. Much of my experience of loss unfolded through photographs, messages, phone calls, and fragments of information received from a distance. The project became a way of navigating grief in a situation where traditional rituals of farewell were no longer possible. The work brings together family photographs, fragments of text messages, digital traces, archival documents, and collages. Rather than treating the archive as a stable record of the past, I approach it as a space in which memory is constantly reassembled and transformed. Initially, the project focused on my father’s archive, but over time working with these materials led me toward a broader investigation of memory, its fragmentation, and the ways it is reconstructed after loss.
At the centre of the project are the ponds and water landscapes my father designed and built over many years. I often accompanied him to these sites, helping with small tasks or simply spending time beside him while he worked. Today, these places function both as traces of his presence and as vessels of memory.
A significant part of my father’s archive remains physically inaccessible to me, while other
materials survive only as digital fragments. This condition of incompleteness shapes the
structure of the project itself. Through photography, collage, and archival research, I explore
how a person continues to exist through the traces they leave behind and how memory is
formed from what remains.
Hands Are Freezing is conceived as a project that may exist in multiple forms, including
exhibitions, an artist book, and a digital archival platform. The series presented here is not a
finished project, but rather one of the current configurations within an ongoing process of
reassembling the archive and memory.
Jana Nizovtseva
