The Aesthetics of Ball Lightning
The work of Viktoriia Tymonova moves across various layers of audience expectation: between truth and fiction, collective memory and fabrication, knowledge and belief. While many seek reassurance in facts, Viktoriia grounds her work in fictional narratives that are unstable, shifting, and intentionally ambiguous. Her images are not factual documentation but rather spark a series of questions without clear answers. They speak in a language that, whilst familiar, is still unsettling, as if saying: you've seen this before, but maybe it wasn’t real.
I first met Viktoriia during her studies at the Academy of Arts, Architecture, and Design in Prague. Here, I was able to observe how her approach gradually crystallised in a quiet, focused manner, marked by a tension striving for precise form. In her ongoing project Why Witches Are 100% Real and Why We Need to Be Afraid of Them (2025 - present), she delves into the history of witchcraft, not as a folkloric motif, but as a political construct and a tool of control. In her interpretation, the witch becomes a figure of split identity: between body and spirit, between power and vulnerability...Read the full article in the printed issue. Get OVER Journal 5
