Natalia Grezina (b. 1987, Sevastopol, Crimea) lives and works in Rotterdam since 2018. She creates soft sculptures, objects, and installations using embroidery, sewing, and a mix of natural and artificial materials. Her practice explores postmemory, the impact of historical heritage on identity, and the fragile balance between human culture and the natural environment. Often drawing on myths and archetypal imagery, she weaves cultural memory into tactile, symbolic forms.
She defines her practice as a state of inner restlessness. Growing up in Crimea, a landscape marked by wars and colonization, she absorbed traces of conflict that continue to shape her perspective. Her works address the “ghost side” of history—unseen or suppressed presences and voices lingering at the margins.
Silence is a recurring theme. For Grezina, it is not absence but a charged space where boundaries blur and new meanings emerge. This theme connects to her identity as both Crimean and migrant, shaped by the trauma of living between conflicting worlds. Silence appears as both burden and resilience, reflecting histories of repression and inherited muteness.
She also reflects on the trauma of distant witnessing—experiencing war through news and social media. This constant exposure leaves subconscious imprints, influencing dreams, emotions, and inner images. In her works, she seeks to transform this tension into material metaphors, gestures, and forms.
Embroidery, passed down from her grandmother, remains central. Slow and laborious, it embeds thought and memory into fabric. She often works on PVC film, juxtaposing industrial modernity with the organic. Recently, her practice has expanded to digital video, soundscapes, and AI-based collaborations, which allow her to address absence, erasure, and spectral presence in contemporary culture.
Through multiple media, Grezina creates spaces of fragile tension between the tangible and the immaterial, the remembered and the silenced.
The Memory
To commemorate the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Netherlands, we are giving shape to memories of freedom and unfreedom. The Memory showcases the results of the encounters and experiences we've had with Studio Herinnering over the past year. We gathered stories, created a podcast, and offered workshops in which four artists collaborated with young people to create new work. We are also showcasing existing and previously unseen work by artists who contributed to the podcast.
Bell (The Alcove Project)
Bell is an intimate monument. Black against an almost black background, it seeks shelter on the threshold of visibility. Quietly powerful it stands up against the many monuments that aggrandize the heroism of war, like in Natalia Grezina’s previous hometown Sevastopol on the Crimea. Grezina seeks a symbolic language that can recognize both human suffering and beauty, and that can evoke the question: What might grow from an inheritance of ashes and ruins? At TENT, Bell will gradually be surrounde
Interwoven
"Interwoven" is a group exhibition that explores the connections between the Dutch and Ukrainians, many of whom have found refuge in the Netherlands. The exhibition showcases the work of 16 contemporary artists from both countries, highlighting their diverse individual and collective practices, which are united by common threads.
Shimmering Land
The Shimmering Land is a duo exhibition that features the artworks of Crimean artists Natalia Grezina and Anton Yermolov, who have been working alongside curator Marth von Loeben on a project about lost heritage.
Galatea Kunstprijs
The exhibition and incentive prize is aimed at refugees with a residence permit living in the Netherlands. In the last months of 2022, an Open Call was placed inviting artists with a recent migration history to apply. A jury selected eight talented candidates out of all the applications. They have a chance of winning a prize and having their work shown in a joint exhibition.
Counterbodies
“Counterbodies” will be one of a kind pop-up exhibition to showcase works of 12 international female artists from the Netherlands, Italy, Germany and Crimea that share a common interest over the theme of the body. The show will feature both established artists and new voices in the contemporary art world, to offer the public both quality and freshness.
Big Art
A pop-up platform for XL artworks and huge design objects, brought to you by a blend of established artists and designers as well as upcoming talents. Every year BIG ART occupies a special building in or around Amsterdam where dozens of galleries, artists and designers fill the place with a unique mix of monumental paintings and drawings, large sculptures and photographs, mesmerizing lightart and impressive interactive installations.
Sunken Garden
The heavy influence of humanity over their natural environment and living condition is undeniable, to the point that the changes in the landscape are visible, tangible and directly reflect on the health of their bodies. The technological hubris that pushes humanity to the limit of their abilities and extremes of their imagination will be absorbed by nature almost effortlessly: the elements will find a way to bring back balance, patiently conquering and reclaiming their rightful domain.
The Black Sea Always Turns Red
In the first chapter of Hundred Year’s War, I chose to explore my own private family history of war and trauma by combining my embroidered sculptures with the tales and witnesses from the visual archive of my grandmother. Each piece has its own story, standing at the border between nightmare and memory, giving an insight to the viewer of the first spark that initiated their creation: the emotional burden handed down on my infant shoulders has shaped the person and the artist I have become.