I am Chinara Chi (Çinarə Soltanova).

I was born in Azerbaijan, in Shamakhi — a city built on seismic faults. But I have lived more than half my life in Baku, the city that rose as mine fell, and that is part of why Baku is also home to me. Collapse and rebuilding, beginning again somewhere new, with new elements, even from nothing — I have never taken these as foreign conditions but as what is supposed to happen. Because of that memory and that code, I think everything I have lived has worked its way into what I make.

In my own portraits I am after the moment of starting from zero: the collapse, the beginning again, and the way human psychology and emotion swing back and forth underneath it all. I hold the face still so that the change becomes visible elsewhere. The contour loosens, the figure dissolves, and in the end only a trace remains.

That is why the portraits at the centre of my work are not only of a person. They are made of geography, of nature, of feeling, of consciousness, and of a great deal that we do not see and cannot see.

I studied literature first, and took up painting afterwards, so that I could carry all of this out with more confidence and more resolve. I do not reject academic training — the opposite. I return to it through a metamodern lens, and I would defend that return as worth making.

It would be absurd to hold literature, drawing, photography, the visual field and installation together on academic grounding alone. What comes to my aid at those moments is something else: inner voices, the size and the weight of the work itself, gratitude, mixed feeling, and a great many other things.

An artist is not made an artist by a single direction or a single moment. Believing that everything from the day I was born until now has been in the service of art — that every personal and social thing I have lived through happened in art's name — both settles me and drives me toward stronger work and further searching.

I believe every place I was born in, have lived in, and will live in is in my character. I have no doubt about how powerfully place, nature, even the air act on what a person makes. Ending, beginning again, building yourself, drawing up your own blueprint and knowing what to take out and what to add in — that is the spine of my work. I become myself not through my own existence alone but through my surroundings, my places, the people I speak with, the trees I see every day. All of it. For me, that is what art is. Wholeness. The one that is best at being whole is my city, and I learned all of it from that code.