riis is a Ukrainian-Russian artist based in Buenos Aires whose practice is rooted in nostalgia for the early internet and in recreating memories through code.On the generative art platform fx(hash), they released the collection peaks in 2022 and toma in 2023.,
In October 2024 riis presented bully at The Garden, twelve images centered on a tree from their family home in Slavyansk, Ukraine, where they spent childhood hours reading. riis has said they were moved to Russia in the 2000s and faced heavy bullying at their new school, with summer trips back to Slavyansk serving as a refuge. In their statement for the exhibition, they described losing their family home in 2014 and regaining it months later, then losing it again in 2022 when war erupted, leaving them caught between identities: “Ukrainian by birth, Russian by passport, welcomed nowhere.” They wrote that they found refuge first in books under that tree as a child, and later in digital art and generative aesthetics discovered through Discord and Twitter. Two of bully's twelve images are based on photographs from Slavyansk, while the rest were generated with artificial intelligence, and all were altered through data compression, quantization, and generative techniques.
