BECOMING THROUGH IRONY: ADRIANA SHPORTAN AND THE REHEARSAL OF ADULTHOOD

Adriana Shportan (born 2000, Ternopil region, Ukraine) is a London-based multidisciplinary artist whose work explores the nexuses of identity creation across the borders of individual experience and the outer world. Her installations and pinacolones frequently retrace an experience of memory and self-discovery, including the contracting, the humour, and the irony that come with the very idea of growing up. Born into a generation raised on a wave of change and the uncertainty of the world around them, Shportan uses her own life experiences to pensively analyse how the modern generation navigates the concept of adulthood. This state is both conversant and unsettled. With her delicately ironic voice and visual language, she transforms personal narratives into common ground, offering a reflection for anyone who has grown into themselves amid changing realities.

As a fashion designer, Shportan was trained at the Kyiv National University of Technologies and Design. She later re-entered the Slade School of Fine Art and the Art Academy in London, where she began to practice based on memory, play, and observation. Her most recent virtual art gallery appearances include the Start Art Fair at the Saatchi Gallery (2023), The Other Art Fair (2023), Octo Galerie, Kyiv (2024), Affordable Art Fair (2025), and Fables, SWANFALL ART Annual Exhibition (2025).

Constructing Adulthood - When It Is Our Turn to Be Adults

Elaborating on this premise, Adriana Shportan’s ongoing series When It Is Our Turn to Be Adults explores the uncomfortable transition from childlike fantasies to adult realities. Through three defined Chapters - “I think I want to be a lawyer”, “I think, I don’t know”, and “I think I need to start thinking” - the series portrays an incremental journey toward self-knowledge, using ironic refrains and jokes alongside candid emotionalism. While the third part remains in development, its first two chapters are a personal and relatable trip, marked by memory, vulnerability, and the quiet comedy of figuring out how to grow up.

“I Think I Want to be A Lawyer”

In New Year (2025), which serves as the lead-off image for the opening chapter, a boy holding a glass stares out at you with equal parts curiosity and defiance. The adults around them are fuzzy, faceless forms - memories more than people. Like the bright tablecloth and dark stains, there are traces of celebration, but also confusion; a reminder that collectivity can sometimes obscure individuality. The child, participant, and spectator all appear to catch a fleeting glimpse of the great theatre of adulthood being played out around them.

New Year, 2025, Oil on Canvas, 113 x 163cm

A similar sense of tension runs through Nova Hata (The New Room) (2025). Drawn from family photographs, the painting zeroes in on fragments that memory tends to retain - the weave of a fabric, a pale pinkish hue, or the play of light against a wall. Here, garments function as a sign of emotional and bodily memory, storing what words cannot. Its muted palette and uninked edges embody memory: partial, soft, and untrustworthy.

Nova Hata (The New Room), 2025, Oil on Canvas, 190 x 215cm

Shportan’s installation Phones (2025) turns a children’s game into a reflection. Sixteen small wooden objects carved to look like cellphones, and shaped from timber blocks that her grandfather sent. As children pretending to call, to belong, to take part in the adult world, this behaviour evokes a ritual of imitation. Remade now, these objects contain humour and longing. The artwork suggests that growing up is not a clean break from the past but a dialogue with it,  a conversation between who we were and who we imagine ourselves to be.

Phones. 2025, Wooden Blocks, Acrylic Paint, and Found/Recycled Materials

 around 10 cm × 5 cm × 1.5 cm for each piece

“I Think, I Don’t Know”

If the first chapter looks outward, the second - I think, I don’t know - addresses the body as a site of doubt. For example, in  Pot (2025), plaster and stretched nylon tights form a surface that feels both tender and unsettling. Its hollow core and taut mesh evoke exposure and constraint, while the use of disposable materials gestures toward a culture of excessive consumption and impermanence. Humour here turns inward, confronting discomfort with quiet irony. The work reads as a dialogue with personal and collective anxieties, reflecting how adulthood is shaped as much by uncertainty as by choice.

Pot, 2025, Plaster, 27 x 25.5 x 72 cm

Throughout these two chapters, When It Is Our Turn to Be Adults reads as an exploration of memory and metamorphosis. Shportan’s use of humble materials and her dry irony lend her musings a sincerity that feels as current as today. For her, growing up is not an ending but a process of continual translation and a constant seeking of meaning between what we inherit and what we elect to become.

Reclaiming Intimacy: The Kiss Series

While, When It Is Our Turn to Be Adults focuses on private memory, Shportan’s Kiss series (2024) extends her reflection into shared history. Inspired by photographs from her grandfather’s archive, she reconnects with moments of tenderness and oppression under Soviet ideology in bold, emotive compositions, when homosexuality was not only forbidden but punishable by imprisonment or death. Yet, even within this system, people with non-traditional orientations found ways to exist, to love, and to endure. In each painting, memory is evoked as a site where intimacy resists homogenization.

Reference photographs from her grandfather’s album, 2024. 

Digital photograph by the artist.

Kiss 1, featured in the Fables, SWANFALL ART Annual Exhibition (Mall Galleries, 2025), depicts a couple of men kissing under the caption “Strong Family - Strong Country.” The affectionate gesture clashes with the language of propaganda, revealing the absurd chasm between collective ideals and private reality. Radiant pinks and greens glow with theatricality against a faded poster, transforming the censored history into an act of defiance.

Kiss 1, 2024, Mixed Media, 115 x 160cm

Kiss 2 (2024) extends this conversation further with Shportan’s inquiry, “Was it difficult to be 'different’ In the Soviet world?” The solution lies in the artwork itself, with its bold colours pushing back against monotony and celebrating difference as a source of beauty. Here, irony is both a shield and a protest - the image of love painted in colours so bright that it will never fade away.

In Kiss 3 (2024), a man and woman embrace in front of a Soviet prison wall, where their kiss is marked by conflict. The concrete backdrop, rigid and impenetrable, recalls both the architecture of silence and the armour of conformity. It stands as a symbol of generational submission, of marriages made for survival, of belonging chosen out of necessity. Through bold colour and restrained humour, Shportan reveals how private tenderness endured quietly beneath public repression.

Across the series, Shportan transforms her family archive into a language of empathy. The Kiss bridge personal and collective memory, linking the private stories of a household to the wider histories of repression and survival. 

A Language of Becoming

Working in painting, sculpture, and installation, Adriana Shportan crafts a language standing on the border between sincerity and irony, recollection and fabrication. Her work does not represent identity so much as it enacts the self, showing how the “self” is always being rehearsed in relation to the world. Whether re-creating personal memories in When It Is Our Turn to Be Adults or reclaiming historical silence in The Kiss Series, she makes memory a mode of empathy. Shportan’s art is a story of becoming, not as an arrival but a constant act of translation - between private and public, past and present, who we were and are still becoming.

Images: © Adriana Shportan, Courtesy of the Artist

Editor: Biyao (Katie) Yu