Artem Trofimenko is an Irish-Ukrainian artist based in Cork whose practice spans film, performance, sound, and photographic installation to explore the poetics of displacement — how memory and perception inhabit the body, and how the act of seeing becomes a form of exile. Working with analogue film, darkroom processes, and found light — “naturally occurring illumination that reveals itself through chance” — Artem traces invisible currents between landscape and the inner world. Rooted in the experience of migration and in-between identity, their work dwells in the space where language falters, where gestures, images, and materials carry sedimented histories of loss, belonging, and becoming. Film is approached as a tactile surface — something to be touched, scratched, and breathed through — while performance reintroduces the body as a reactive, sensing site.

Artem graduated with a BA in Fine Art from CCAD in 2018 and is a studio member of Sample-Studios (Studios of Sanctuary, 2025) and a technician at Cork Film Centre. They have received Arts Council Agility Awards in 2021 and 2024. Artem is currently developing Radio Silence, a cross-border research project between Finland and Ireland supported by NEMO – Northern European Mobility Opportunity. Recent projects include Falling in Grace / Rising Matter, exhibited at GOMA, Waterford (2025). Their films have screened at STAMP Festival, 9.57 Festival, Out Of Focus, and IndieCork, while performances have been presented at Gallery X (Dublin), La Briche Audio (France), Cinesalon (Cork), and Spazio Nu (Pontedera, Italy). In 2025 they completed a residency at Pedvāle Art Park, Latvia, where they developed the short Super 8 work A Ladder on the Edge of Living, and will present a new performance, /f/XILE, during a residency at Sirius Arts Centre in December 2025.

Artem’s work is deeply informed by somatic and performance research, having trained extensively in Butoh with Atsushi Takenouchi, Yumiko Yoshioka, and Tadashi Endo. Their performances emerge from Butoh’s apophatic, subconscious, and transformational approaches to the body. They also work as a facilitator with Slow Camera Exchange and a range of community organisations, creating spaces that support access to creative and analogue processes for diverse and mixed-ability groups, with a focus on analogue image-making and embodied creative expression.