Paradise

Ola Suprun began this series during the war – when the place she carried inside herself as a feeling of safety suddenly became fragile. Paradise, for her, is not an abstraction. It is a specific emotional memory: a state of rootedness and ease tied to a place that shaped her, and that she fears losing.

She investigates a tension most people recognize but rarely name: we know exactly what paradise feels like, yet we do not choose to live in it. We sacrifice it daily – for ambition, obligation, the pace of modern life – while orienting our entire existence toward the hope of one day returning.

The works in this series ask whether that state can survive when the physical place is under threat. Whether paradise can exist within us independently of the world outside – and whether it is enough to have known it once, to carry it always.

“This is my way of capturing a feeling I know precisely, but do not choose to live in. Paradise is not where I live. It is where I return – in memory, in work, in the act of preservation itself.”