Talented Russian artist with a Bangladeshi root, Sabina Khosseyn, has amped up her talent for this year's Asian Art Biennale Bangladesh 2018, showcasing a riveting artwork from her "Regrets" series. In an exclusive interview with Dhaka Courier, she said that as people want different things in life, there is always a contemplation to choose between the right and wrong. Hence, her artwork is depicted in black and white, binding the choices in those two defining colours.

A professional artist who likes to paint using different mediums of art, Sabina chooses acrylic as the colours dry quicker than others comparatively. Her twin sister, the equally talented Rubina, prefers pencil and charcoal. Yet their artworks consist of vivid and realistic portraits.

Hailing from Moscow, both the sisters loved to draw from a very early age. Sabina reminisced their love for cartoons and their passion to become cartoonists. They graduated from the famous Andryaka Watercolor School when they were sixteen and dreamed to study Fine Arts at a university. Unfortunately their talent was taken by the admission committee of a famous art academy in Moscow in negative light, who refused to believe that they had done the artworks.

Undaunted, they switched track and studied Linguistics, yet the passion for becoming true artists persevered. In between their studies and leisure time, they drew and painted for themselves, and sometimes for their friends and relatives, that only strengthen their artistic skills. One day, while searching for an inspiration in internet, sisters discovered a "dry brush" technique, which later brought them success in the portrait genre.

Their "Black and White" series of portrait of celebrities was their first professional art project. Later they created a more sophisticated series of portraits "Emotions" for their solo exhibition in Moscow.

While Sabina considers her sister to be more of a traditional artist, she attributes herself as a contemporary artist, with both of them currently considered to be hyperrealist artists. Some of her other works include "Life VS Game", "Emotions", "Wet" and "Surrealism".

In Life VS Game, Sabina had an idea of creating something new, something she hadn't yet tried. Suddenly, she came up with a series of surreal paintings where she touches upon the question of living the life and playing with/in life. In Surrealism, Sabina's main idea was to point out human untrue nature - how people use to pretend that they are somebody they are not, how people lie to others and sometimes to themselves. This series is Sabina's first ever oil paintings series. Continuing her love to Venetian masks, she created surrealistic, mystique with a hint of depressiveness artworks, where unlike her previous still lives with masks she put the Venetian masks on imaginary characters.

She had previously exhibited during the 2016 Asian Art Biennale, where she had first witnessed Bangladeshi artworks and she was pleasantly surprised at how liberal the works were. She had a notion of Bangladeshi artists carrying conservative themes, which was broken and result in a newly found respect. "There are lots of ideas I feel close to and would love to collaborate in future".

The sisters had previously exhibited their works "Bangla Amar Desh" ("Bengal is My Land") at Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy back in 2016 as well.

She intends to work more on highlighting social problems such as women's rights, poverty and drug addiction in the near future.