Popova receiving the first prize at the 34th International Jewellery Competition EVERY BODY – awards. Photo: Jagoda Patron (The Gallery of Art in Legnica)

First prize and 1kg of silver to KHiO student

We congratulate Aleksandra Popova, a master’s student in metal and jewellery, on being awarded the Grand Prix at one of Europe’s largest showcases of contemporary art jewellery, the Legnica Jewellery Festival SILVER.

Photo: Małgorzata Banaszkiewicz (The Gallery of Art in Legnica)

What does it mean to you to win the Grand Prix of Minister of Culture and National Heritage?

- The Legnica Silver Festival is one of Europe's oldest events dedicated to contemporary and experimental art jewellery, and just being there among so many talented artists was already incredible. Receiving the Grand Prix on top of that still feels unreal. It feels like an international recognition of my work, and I know it will affect both my practice and my confidence going forward. I genuinely hope it will open new doors – new opportunities to develop, to establish myself, and to connect with people who are part of the jewellery art world.

Popova A Lekandra (1) — Popova's artwork No Name that won Grand Prix of the minister of culture and national heritage. Photos from the archives of the Gallery of Art in Legnica (Poland)

How are you planning to use the prize money, and especially, the 1kg of silver?

- As a student of metal art and jewellery, the prize money will go toward tools and materials – investing in those gives me more space and freedom to create. As for the silver, 1 kg is a generous amount and I already have ideas for jewellery collections I want to develop from it. I see it as both a material to work with and a motivation.

Can you tell us about your award-winning artwork and how it connects to the festival's topic EVERY BODY?

Photos from the archives of the Gallery of Art in Legnica (Poland), model: Julia Ciołkowska.

- I created a conceptual jewellery piece exploring the theme of the depersonalized body in the context of current wars. It's a heavy topic – heavy to process, heavy to talk about, and heavy to sit with. The piece is an artistic representation of a meat hook, forged in iron, hanging from hammered nickel silver chains, attached to a leather strap. Creating it carried a lot of personal emotional weight. It came from a need to respond to something that felt impossible to look away from. Staying silent starts to feel like a position of its own. This piece was a way of refusing that. It doesn't claim to do much. It can't. But it felt necessary.

The artwork is called ‘No Name’, and Popova has written this piece to accompany the artwork:

No Name

Only bodies left aside,
with no name,
no shroud, no grave.
Handled, not held.

As the count rises,
individuality collapses.
Loss of life becomes numb inevitability,
repetitive, fading to invisibility.
It is no longer a shock,
but a pattern –
of bodies that are only matter.

Behind the cloak of war,
bodies cease to be bodies.
They become mass –
counted, abstracted, managed.
Untouched, they hang in place,
stripped of identity and name.

A chain of repetition wraps around them,
a hook of endless violence,
where the body is reduced
to a weight suspended in silence.

When the dead are dehumanised,
it reflects the dehumanisation
already inflicted in life.