PROGRAM / The Chalk Walls’ Room

EN/
The room with its chalk walls –
how will it look to you I wonder
once your exile begins?
– Louise Glück, Meadowlands/ Departure, 1998 –

In the last few years, our notion of private space has changed significantly – first thanks to Airbnb, later because of Covid-19 and the war in Ukraine. It is as if they are two different worlds, historically and conceptually. The limits of imagination and the simple experience of one's own body are being stretched to the breaking point. How to cope with a new reality? How to learn to live in it? This is what the Ukrainian visual artist Alina Panasenko explores in her current work. The in-situ project, which responds to the space of a former factory hall, is also a reminiscence of her personal experience – deeply intimate, but in many ways quite universal. She combines work with large-format photography and 3D modeling – using both technologies, she grasps space in the sense of “construction”, the result of demanding combinatorics or rather simple coincidence, against which the warm, imaginatively gifted human body provides a sharp counterpoint.