Lustrous sea gods repose within apparently classical coastal and submarine landscapes. Their bodies resemble organisms as well—real, tangible, and available to study. Yet they are chthonic, and in truth never fully fathomable.
Monstrous shells form valves driven by a muscle veiled in rows of tentacles—irritated, playfully twitching. The divine mollusk lies upon a shore of dead fish instead of sand. Toxic sheens ripple across the fish bodies. But the oyster, known as the ocean’s filter, draws in the contaminated liquids from the immeasurable surface of the coast, urging the dead fish to resurrect.
A whale in the boundless, scaleless mass of the ocean undergoes two deaths in succession—through the explosion and the fall. The god sheds scraps of skin, gliding toward the seabed, exposing inert, unliftable slabs of flesh. Consumed at the surface, birds emerge from beneath the meat, which becomes a nutritive foundation for a new ecosystem as it descends to the depths.
Slashed sea urchins, with tragically exposed sexual organs turned toward the sky from rocks rising above the water. Piscine birds hover above the funerary sushi set, devouring the gonads until they sink into the ocean themselves, undone by their own greed.
This is a cinematic three-channel installation created by Alena Saveleva with the support of Liam Young as an executive producer.
‘Whale’s Chant’ SMTH+MMMAD Festival : Madrid’s Digital Arts Festival, Max Center, Bilbao
In Alena's work, nature is approached not as an external environment, but as an ensouled, multilayered system composed of intersecting ecologies. It is understood as a dynamic field of agencies, presences, and relations rather than as a passive backdrop to human activity.
Myth, although often treated as a generalized cultural term, is employed here as a methodological device — a mode of visualizing and articulating energies that remain unspoken and fundamentally unverbalizable. In this context, myth functions not as narrative fiction, but as a cognitive and perceptual framework through which distributed vitality in nature can be rendered sensible. In her artistic practice and research, Alena engages with alternative, non-Western cosmologies — particularly animism and analogism — in order to displace anthropocentric models of correlation between human and non-human entities. Drawing on these ontological frameworks, her work seeks to shift from a human-centered relational paradigm toward a pluriversal ecology of agencies and reenchant nature, not romantically, but spiritually.
The aesthetics of the grotesque sharpens the perception of beauty, steering it away from refinement and sentiment. The imagery of flesh and decay gently shocks, revealing the serenity and beauty of death as a natural phase of life. Therefore, death in her work is understood within the cycle of transformation.
Alena pursues a clinical crafting of beauty rather than the self-expression or depiction of fleeting emotions. In her practice, the artist acts as a medium for forces larger than the self, as in her latest work, which explores the Ocean and the interconnectedness of the marine ecosystem.
The way she directs her work, particularly in terms of the creatures’ choreography, is inspired by the metaphorical language used in science to describe non-human experience. Within contemporary discourse, the non-human state of being is acknowledged as not fully accessible to human perception; therefore, art can pursue alternative visual and sonic strategies to approach and engage with such entities. Alena proposes a mode of close yet respectful observation of biological life, sustained to the point of psychosomatic tension — until ecology itself begins to appear estranged.
‘Oyster’s Chant’ SMTH+MMMAD Festival : Madrid’s Digital Arts Festival, Oasiz Madrid, Madrid
'Chants of Ocean Gods' is an immersive triptych, each panel of which is devoted to one key marine life species. The choice of the whale, the oyster, and the urchin was based on their ecological and semantical charge. The visual loop of the installation is meticulously designed, both visually and narratively, to create three seamless, uninterrupted cycles.
The original sound was written by Alena’s collaborator, film director and sound designer Honzo Smilek. The soundtrack elaborated for the current artwork was treated as another layer of landscape beyond the marine sceneries—an ephemeral, sonar one. It does not feel like a conventional composition, but rather like an enveloping mix of visceral, beastly, distorted underwater noises and non-human voices.
This project is particularly flexible in terms of scale of perception.The 'Whale’s Chant' was shown in Singapore in December 2024 at Highlight Art Gallery within the group show 'Turning Point', curated by Youth Digital Group. The piece was presented on an LED screen in an intimate dark space.
The triptych was displayed in December 2025 at Blanc Gallery in New York, United States, curated by Not Yet Art as part of the exhibition 'Touching the Void: Art Without an Object'. The three video art parts were projected onto the walls of an enclosed room, shaping an immersive cave within the open space of the group show.
The piece was also selected as one of five winners to be awarded and exhibited at MMMAD V Festival from January to April 2026 on large digital displays across a variety of public spaces in Madrid, Seville, Bilbao, Barcelona, Alicante, Vitoria, and Murcia.
Perhaps it is not the work that observes the landscape, but the ecology quietly rehearsing itself through the work. As the artist says: "I like silent states that are uneasy or unnecessary to verbalize. Yet I pursue a committed urge toward visual perfection. The process of my work is always a subtle, vulnerable balance between control and obsession. It can be framed as a disciplined fascination with fluid weirdness."
