Darja Linder, born in Russia in 1992, grew up in Düren, North Rhine-Westphalia, and currently lives and works in Saarbrücken.

Her figurative paintings are peppered with visual codes that relate to the world of experience of her generation - from dating apps and television series to internet phenomena such as "cringe culture". The colourful and garish aesthetics play with the late capitalist longing for oversaturation and abundance.
However, it acts as a false bottom, behind which painful themes are often hidden. Questions are raised about class, gender and migration. Linder observes the connections between political (power) structures and individual desires and examines in her works how these desires reach deep into our identities.

In her current project "PostOstBestWest", she uses multimedia to explore the feeling of being uprooted and the double experience of foreignness that she shares with those who moved to Germany as children from the former USSR, the "Mitgenommenen".
The paintings and audio works overflow with sensory impressions and Western pop culture, just like the first moments in Germany. The works create bittersweet visual worlds between capitalism and socialism, between trauma and escape from reality, between violence and lost childhood, between insecurity and self-determination.