Sofiia Yesakova (*1998) lives and works in Berlin. In 2024 she participated in the Berlin postgraduate program Goldrausch Künstlerinnen. Yesakova is a member of Frontviews at HAUNT Berlin, where she is also part of the curatorial board.
Central to Yesakova’s artistic practice is the research into the increasing role of information in regulating and controlling human behaviour—being able as it is to rapidly adapt to any situation and reduce everything to statistics. A search for truth in a stream of interference.
Yesakova uses diagrams or engineering-like schematic drawings to arrive at an alternative form of artistic narrative. Bureaucratically consistent, dry and lifeless. She often refers to theoretical concepts like Gilles Deleuze’s layering approach of thinking, Jacques Lacan’s analysis of society’s structures and Giorgio Agamben’s biopolitical concepts.
In recent years, she has been inspired by the idea of ciphering and creating a certain structure of visual storytelling, often inspired by engineering drawings. Using spatial interventions in order to create certain emotions and sensations, she deals with the intertwining of reality and illusion, the boundary between the emotional and the rational, or the the tension between softness and hardness.
The theme of war memorials has also become an important part of Sofia’s artistic practice in recent years. In her work, she turns to monuments as historical markersand as sites of collective memory, trauma, and identity. By examining their forms, materials, and symbolism, Sofiia explores how societies choose to remember or to forget the past. War memorials give the impression of something depressing and coldly detached, yet they have regained relevance in the context of disputes among various groups over history, over who is remembered, and how. Her practice resonates with the writings of Paul Virilio, who explored the relationships between memory, war, and the built environment. Virilio emphasized how monuments and memorials embody both remembrance and erasure: they preserve traces of loss while simultaneously shaping narratives of power and identity. Sofiia engages with this paradox, highlighting the way a single memorial can inspire reverence in one era, yet provoke doubt or resistance in another. Yesakova foregrounds the fragile, shifting meanings inscribed in these sites. A memorial may stand as a site of reverence for one generation, yet provoke estrangement or resistance for another. Her work reveals this instability, the way monuments can obscure as much as they commemorate.
In Yesakova’s work, the symbolism and imagery of the Renaissance may intersect with rigid constructivist forms, and plans and drawings from concentration camps contrast with the clean idiom of minimalism. A lot of her works make reference to the formerly religious context of art. They use iconology or resemble frescoes from a temple, like a part of a wall taken from its original context and moved into the gallery space. This gesture of “dislocation” reinforces the tension central to her practice: the confrontation between the permanence implied by stone or monument, and the fragility of memory when uprooted from its context. Working with materials like gesso, wood and layers of gelatine, Yesakova uses different techniques such as woodcarving, icon painting, blueprint-like drawings and site-specific installations in regard to the history of the place and with respect for its architecture.
Sofiia Yesakova earned her MA in Fine Arts from the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture (NAFAA) in Kyiv, UA. Her recent exhibitions include a duo show “Black Wall” at Umbrella | West Coast Exhibitions Gallery in Denmark; “O, dark dark dark”, a duo exhibition at spazio DISPLAY Art Space, curated by Ilaria Monti, Parma, Italy; and another duo exhibition “Vanitous Spectre” at Iron House, located within Nymphenburg Castle, Munich, DE.
On Sofiia Yesakova’s series Cargo–200 . Experimental Projections on Surfaces
The latest project by Sofiia Yesakova, a Kyiv-born artist living and working in Berlin, is called “Cargo 200”. The military term refers to a zinc coffin containing the body of a deceased soldier, roughly 200 kg of cargo, for transport to its burial place. It’s also a euphemism for a casualty. In military jargon, the term is shortened to “”; it came into use among Soviet military personnel during the 1980s war in Afghanistan. Now, with Russia’s war against Ukraine in its third year and the influx of news from the front, the term has become frighteningly well-known in both Ukraine and Russia.
This brutal name contrasts with the refined, aesthetic works of Yesakova’s series, in which white or black rectangles are covered with delicate, precise drawings of architectural plans. Yesakova says she uses blueprints of concentration camps and burial grounds “as a prototype, without redrawing or copying them. The visual language is important to me. Without knowledge of the context, my works look like well-composed abstractions, and only understanding the context reveals their dark side.”
Yesakova’s works evoke a sense of being outside of time. The modernity of the theme, paired with the almost guild-level craftsmanship with which she handles the material and her references to the works of the Constructivists, call to mind the outdated but still functioning concept of finding pleasure in pure art—the aesthetic pleasure of interacting with beauty.
An extreme detachment from the theme, the departure from crude, literal images into minimalism, is an attempt by the artist, who is Ukrainian, to minimize the feelings she experiences towards what is happening, to organize the chaos of the modern world. But more than this, she arrives at a visual solution that conveys multiple meanings.
The first and most obvious is a dispute with the positivist belief in the power of humanity, internationalism, and the possibility of a universal language, all of which are characteristic of the avant-garde artists of the 1910s to 1920s, for instance Vladimir Tatlin, El Lissitzky, and Kazimir Malevich. We find their stylistic influence reflected in Yesakova’s work, which also picks up on Tatlin’s attention to material, to its weight and texture. In addition, the black square in one image of the series Experimental projections on the surfaces 5.7. is a direct reference to Malevich’s Black Square (1915, Tretyakov Gallery). One of Malevich’s intentions was to declare the end of art. In Yesakova’s work, we see a sooty square that appears to have survived a fire, superimposed with a bird’s-eye view of burial sites; the piece speaks of war “as the black spot in human history,” the end of life in general, and the possible end of humanity along with its art.
Kurt Tucholsky’s statement “One death is a tragedy, a thousand—a statistic,” which became famous thanks to Erich Maria Remarque’s novel The Black Obelisk and later through Josef Stalin, is one of the keys to Yesakova’s works. The precise, rational architectural plans of camps and burial grounds confirmed the relentless logic of calculating space for the functioning, killing, and burying of people considered to be no more than physical entities with minimal needs. This is Yesakova’s attempt to convey that a person is not fully accounted for when he or she is merely a physical unit, that a person cannot and should not be reduced to a mechanism. And the deaths of thousands should not, despite the normalization of war, become a mere statistic; to achieve this, people constantly need to be reminded of this.
Yesakova has said that since 2022, she has been deeply interested in the theme of war on a global scale: its components, its causes, and the incomprehensibility of its horror, as well as the themes of data manipulation as it relates to media coverage and the impossibility of determining the truth. She refers to Giorgio Agamben’s thoughts on violence and Hannah Arendt’s remarks on the “banality of evil.”
In her diploma project “Altar in a modern context” (2021, Kyiv, NAFAA), which featured flexible medical tubes, Yesakova was still influenced by her teacher’s concept of the “fold era,” viewing, in keeping with Gilles Deleuze’s essay “The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque,” “the fold as living matter that can convey a feeling, tell a story.” Conversely, in “Cargo–200”, she adheres to strict geometry, questioning the perfect order of Leibniz’s universe in the history of humanity.
Anti-war art has a long history, but it emerged onto the world stage most vividly after World War I, during which, for the first time in human history, new weaponry led to killings and injuries on an industrial scale. Otto Dix, who experienced the war first-hand, responded with the painting The Trench (now lost), which depicted a gruesome scene of carnage and dismembered bodies that contemporaries found too horrifying to bear. Picasso’s Guernica (1937, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía) ushered in a second wave of anti-war art catalyzed by World War II. Abstract artists, realists, Art Informel and Tachist artists, and actionists all sought ways to express their sentiments toward the war by pouring out their emotions or analyzing the past in the hopes of preventing its recurrence. For Yesakova, “the balance between emotionality and rationality (the direction that prefers the mind to the senses in cognition, turning away from sensory reality)” is important.
Creating works with elements of diagrams, plans, structures, or ciphers is a common practice in contemporary art. For instance, Jorinde Voigt visualizes Ludwig van Beethoven’s sonatas on white canvases, while Simon Denny creates “Document Reliefs”: With a patent that becomes the motive for his work.
With the advent of AI, technology has soared to new heights. Yet amidst the current global landscape, it’s evident that while technology evolves, humanity remains imprisoned by its crocodilian, primitive essence, having only learned to approach the killing of its own kind rationally.
Metropolis begins and ends with the phrase “The mediator between the head and the hands must be the heart,” and perhaps now, almost 100 years later, this remains humanity’s only hope. Yesakova’s works, at first glance, may not tug at the viewer’s heartstrings or evoke a visceral emotional response. They do not scream about war but rather assert the inevitability of death as its consequence. In addressing the mind first, they reveal the depth of their sorrow only upon contemplation.
[1] Simon Denny, Worker Cage Document Reliefs, 2020, at Fine Arts, Sydney. Online: https://www.moussemagazine.it/magazine/simon-denny-worker-cage-document-reliefs-at-fine-arts-sydney-2020/
[2] George Grosz: “Zu meinen neuen Bildern,” in: Das Kunstblatt, vol. 5, 1921, p. 14.
200th or dvukhsotyi (Двухсотый)
By Elena Voronovich
On Sofiia Yesakova’s Exhibition Black Wall and series Blind Spot 2.1 – 2.100.
Icon means picture. Borrowed from Greek, the term generally refers to the pictorial representation, the material external image, traditionally known as a panel painting. As such, it differs fundamentally from our ideas of immaterial internal images, which derive from the Latin term imago. As a Christian cult picture that became established between the 4th and early 8th centuries, primarily in the Eastern Church, the icon, which follows in the traditionof ancient panel paintings, is revered as the true picture–the Vera Ikon. In sacred spaces, icons are regarded as “not painted pictures”, “pictures of heavenly origin, ”and“ the seat of the divine being. It is the ritual that prescribes clear rules, instructions and order for both the production and handling of the cult picture. The icon, the picture used in worship, appeals to the viewer. It makes a promise. It promises something. It promises nothing less than the appearance of a miracle through the picture. In the cult, at the centre of which the icons stand, the constant repetition of homage to the picture takes place, which presupposes the presence in the picture of what the picture shows us. In this respect, every cult picture fundamentally contradicts the essence of the picture, whose existence is always based on being something other than what it shows. The iconostasis, the “revered and much-kissed” wall of pictures that separates the altar area from the nave in Orthodox churches, signifies the drawing of a boundary line that establishes the sacred space, which is usually oriented towards the east.
This is where revelation is expected. It is an inaccessible space that differsfrom the profane space. A space that can only be approached in devotion or prayer. The arrangement of the icons on the wall follows strict rules. At the centre of the wall is the royal door, which potentially grants access and becomes the place of the expected revelation.
In the exhibition Black Wall, exhibition space becomes a kind of oratory. A place of contemplation, where we display 98 panels by Ukrainian artist Sofiia Yesakova from the series Blind Spot 2.1. – 2.100., which enter into dialogue with a sound piece created especially for the exhibition by German sound artist Sascha Kregel. An artistic dialogue that raises questions about contemporary art in the face of the ongoing terror of war and the darkness that it brings into our present, presented for the first time at umbrella.
For months, Sofiia Yesakova produced 100 almost identical picture panels in repetitive, monotonous work processes. In this contemplative work, the artist finds a way to intensively engage with the war, its horrors and its dynamics. A wall of pictures is formed on the north side of the exhibition space from 98 picture panels created using icon painting techniques and reminiscent of icons, i.e. Christian cult pictures, in their composition. Where the sun never shines, where no revelation is to be expected, the Black Wall emerges and denies the viewer access to another world. It promises him nothing. This wall is opaque. Our gaze bounces off this wall of pictures. It reaches a dead end. Here, we are not looked atby the true face. Instead of the Vera Icon, which traditionally shines out at us from icons, the empty black picture panels multiple-fold hold up a mirror to us. What we see is our own face. It is reflected in nothingness, in the emptiness of the black, faceless icon, and reveals the horror. The picture wall becomes a picture front, a tableau of horror, of which we become a part at the moment when our reflection looks back at us from there. The sacred format is”desecrated”as the artist says, and transferred into a secular narrative in which both the individual panels and the entire wall of pictures are to be understood as a“visualised report of loss”and a“silent scream”. What the Black Wall shows is that representation can only fail, or perhaps must fail, in the face of the horrors of war.
From across the room, from the gallery on the south side of the exhibition space, the sound enters the room and fills it. The tonal systems created in Sascha Kregel's sound are not based on harmonic relationships between tones. Instead, he uses the surfaces and lines of drawings as a basis for creating his tonal ambiences, which are more random than planned and consist of arrhythmic minimal patterns, resonance fields and recurring noise. The resulting sound fields are mostly resonant. They are resonance fields formed by a collection of tonest hat are constantly moving themselves. Another essential aspect of Sascha Kregel’s sound is noise, which constantly present in every type of electronically generated sound–audible or inaudible–and, from technical perspective, becomes an indispensable part of the sound as a background. Contrary to the usual effort to minimize noise in favor of audibility, it is repeatedly brought to the forefront here, lending the sound depth and texture. In a constant alternation in which dark sound fields and latent noise sometimes come to the fore and sometimes recede into the background, and in the difference to the recurring interferer noise, the sound emerges and forms a dark, threatening wall of sound in the room, a sound space from which the exhibition visitor cannot escape. The listener is confronted with mostly monotonous soundscapes in which conciliatory harmonies only briefly emerge. Harmonies that, before they can calm the listener, are either cancelled out by interference noises or by the apparent nothingness of the permanent and audible noise, thus enabling a sound experience that is an audible response to Sofiia Yesakova's wall of pictures.
A large oak bench is placed in front of the picture wall and becomes an indispensable part of the exhibition. It invites visitors to stay, to see and to listen. Silently it urges them: Sit down, rest your tired legs until you don’t know what hit you.
by Ulrike Kregel
Interview for Goldrausch Künstlerinnenprojekt, 2024
The role of information in our time is an important topic in your art. Why?
I'm interested in how information is communicated on social media. One might think that we know everything nowadays, but that’s not true. It’s essential to look at information critically, and it’s difficult to figure out what actually corresponds to the truth. The war in Ukraine has made this topic even more urgent for me.
How does this become art?
I create conceptual art and draw on a lot of literature that discusses violence and war. I'm also interested in the parallels between military and religious systems. In the military, people often speak of a “holy war” and promise a better life after death, which is very similar to religion. In my art, I try to speak about violence and war in a very structured, emotionless language. Only in this way can we truly understand what’s happening.
What materials do you use?
I often use wood, which I prepare in the same way as for icon painting. But there’s no physicality, no icon. I also work with drawings based on designs of concentration camps. If you see my works without knowing what they’re about, you might think they are Minimal Art. But once you understand the context, the perception changes.
How has the war in Ukraine changed your art?
I had already been working on the themes of violence and religion before. When the war broke out, I couldn't think about art at all at first. Then I started searching for ways to talk about the war and decided to use this very rational language. My art is not just about the war in Ukraine—rather, I try to address the mechanisms of war and violence as such.
By Beate Scheder
Sofiia Yesakova (*1998) lives and works in Berlin. In 2024 she participated in the Berlin postgraduate program Goldrausch Künstlerinnen. Yesakova is a member of Frontviews at HAUNT Berlin, where she is also part of the curatorial board.
Central to Yesakova’s artistic practice is the research into the increasing role of information in regulating and controlling human behaviour—being able as it is to rapidly adapt to any situation and reduce everything to statistics. A search for truth in a stream of interference.
Yesakova uses diagrams or engineering-like schematic drawings to arrive at an alternative form of artistic narrative. Bureaucratically consistent, dry and lifeless. She often refers to theoretical concepts like Gilles Deleuze’s layering approach of thinking, Jacques Lacan’s analysis of society’s structures and Giorgio Agamben’s biopolitical concepts.
In recent years, she has been inspired by the idea of ciphering and creating a certain structure of visual storytelling, often inspired by engineering drawings. Using spatial interventions in order to create certain emotions and sensations, she deals with the intertwining of reality and illusion, the boundary between the emotional and the rational, or the the tension between softness and hardness.
The theme of war memorials has also become an important part of Sofia’s artistic practice in recent years. In her work, she turns to monuments as historical markersand as sites of collective memory, trauma, and identity. By examining their forms, materials, and symbolism, Sofiia explores how societies choose to remember or to forget the past. War memorials give the impression of something depressing and coldly detached, yet they have regained relevance in the context of disputes among various groups over history, over who is remembered, and how. Her practice resonates with the writings of Paul Virilio, who explored the relationships between memory, war, and the built environment. Virilio emphasized how monuments and memorials embody both remembrance and erasure: they preserve traces of loss while simultaneously shaping narratives of power and identity. Sofiia engages with this paradox, highlighting the way a single memorial can inspire reverence in one era, yet provoke doubt or resistance in another. Yesakova foregrounds the fragile, shifting meanings inscribed in these sites. A memorial may stand as a site of reverence for one generation, yet provoke estrangement or resistance for another. Her work reveals this instability, the way monuments can obscure as much as they commemorate.
In Yesakova’s work, the symbolism and imagery of the Renaissance may intersect with rigid constructivist forms, and plans and drawings from concentration camps contrast with the clean idiom of minimalism. A lot of her works make reference to the formerly religious context of art. They use iconology or resemble frescoes from a temple, like a part of a wall taken from its original context and moved into the gallery space. This gesture of “dislocation” reinforces the tension central to her practice: the confrontation between the permanence implied by stone or monument, and the fragility of memory when uprooted from its context. Working with materials like gesso, wood and layers of gelatine, Yesakova uses different techniques such as woodcarving, icon painting, blueprint-like drawings and site-specific installations in regard to the history of the place and with respect for its architecture.
Sofiia Yesakova earned her MA in Fine Arts from the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture (NAFAA) in Kyiv, UA. Her recent exhibitions include a duo show “Black Wall” at Umbrella | West Coast Exhibitions Gallery in Denmark; “O, dark dark dark”, a duo exhibition at spazio DISPLAY Art Space, curated by Ilaria Monti, Parma, Italy; and another duo exhibition “Vanitous Spectre” at Iron House, located within Nymphenburg Castle, Munich, DE.
On Sofiia Yesakova’s series Cargo–200 . Experimental Projections on Surfaces
The latest project by Sofiia Yesakova, a Kyiv-born artist living and working in Berlin, is called “Cargo 200”. The military term refers to a zinc coffin containing the body of a deceased soldier, roughly 200 kg of cargo, for transport to its burial place. It’s also a euphemism for a casualty. In military jargon, the term is shortened to “”; it came into use among Soviet military personnel during the 1980s war in Afghanistan. Now, with Russia’s war against Ukraine in its third year and the influx of news from the front, the term has become frighteningly well-known in both Ukraine and Russia.
This brutal name contrasts with the refined, aesthetic works of Yesakova’s series, in which white or black rectangles are covered with delicate, precise drawings of architectural plans. Yesakova says she uses blueprints of concentration camps and burial grounds “as a prototype, without redrawing or copying them. The visual language is important to me. Without knowledge of the context, my works look like well-composed abstractions, and only understanding the context reveals their dark side.”
Yesakova’s works evoke a sense of being outside of time. The modernity of the theme, paired with the almost guild-level craftsmanship with which she handles the material and her references to the works of the Constructivists, call to mind the outdated but still functioning concept of finding pleasure in pure art—the aesthetic pleasure of interacting with beauty.
An extreme detachment from the theme, the departure from crude, literal images into minimalism, is an attempt by the artist, who is Ukrainian, to minimize the feelings she experiences towards what is happening, to organize the chaos of the modern world. But more than this, she arrives at a visual solution that conveys multiple meanings.
The first and most obvious is a dispute with the positivist belief in the power of humanity, internationalism, and the possibility of a universal language, all of which are characteristic of the avant-garde artists of the 1910s to 1920s, for instance Vladimir Tatlin, El Lissitzky, and Kazimir Malevich. We find their stylistic influence reflected in Yesakova’s work, which also picks up on Tatlin’s attention to material, to its weight and texture. In addition, the black square in one image of the series Experimental projections on the surfaces 5.7. is a direct reference to Malevich’s Black Square (1915, Tretyakov Gallery). One of Malevich’s intentions was to declare the end of art. In Yesakova’s work, we see a sooty square that appears to have survived a fire, superimposed with a bird’s-eye view of burial sites; the piece speaks of war “as the black spot in human history,” the end of life in general, and the possible end of humanity along with its art.
Kurt Tucholsky’s statement “One death is a tragedy, a thousand—a statistic,” which became famous thanks to Erich Maria Remarque’s novel The Black Obelisk and later through Josef Stalin, is one of the keys to Yesakova’s works. The precise, rational architectural plans of camps and burial grounds confirmed the relentless logic of calculating space for the functioning, killing, and burying of people considered to be no more than physical entities with minimal needs. This is Yesakova’s attempt to convey that a person is not fully accounted for when he or she is merely a physical unit, that a person cannot and should not be reduced to a mechanism. And the deaths of thousands should not, despite the normalization of war, become a mere statistic; to achieve this, people constantly need to be reminded of this.
Yesakova has said that since 2022, she has been deeply interested in the theme of war on a global scale: its components, its causes, and the incomprehensibility of its horror, as well as the themes of data manipulation as it relates to media coverage and the impossibility of determining the truth. She refers to Giorgio Agamben’s thoughts on violence and Hannah Arendt’s remarks on the “banality of evil.”
In her diploma project “Altar in a modern context” (2021, Kyiv, NAFAA), which featured flexible medical tubes, Yesakova was still influenced by her teacher’s concept of the “fold era,” viewing, in keeping with Gilles Deleuze’s essay “The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque,” “the fold as living matter that can convey a feeling, tell a story.” Conversely, in “Cargo–200”, she adheres to strict geometry, questioning the perfect order of Leibniz’s universe in the history of humanity.
Anti-war art has a long history, but it emerged onto the world stage most vividly after World War I, during which, for the first time in human history, new weaponry led to killings and injuries on an industrial scale. Otto Dix, who experienced the war first-hand, responded with the painting The Trench (now lost), which depicted a gruesome scene of carnage and dismembered bodies that contemporaries found too horrifying to bear. Picasso’s Guernica (1937, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía) ushered in a second wave of anti-war art catalyzed by World War II. Abstract artists, realists, Art Informel and Tachist artists, and actionists all sought ways to express their sentiments toward the war by pouring out their emotions or analyzing the past in the hopes of preventing its recurrence. For Yesakova, “the balance between emotionality and rationality (the direction that prefers the mind to the senses in cognition, turning away from sensory reality)” is important.
Creating works with elements of diagrams, plans, structures, or ciphers is a common practice in contemporary art. For instance, Jorinde Voigt visualizes Ludwig van Beethoven’s sonatas on white canvases, while Simon Denny creates “Document Reliefs”: With a patent that becomes the motive for his work.
With the advent of AI, technology has soared to new heights. Yet amidst the current global landscape, it’s evident that while technology evolves, humanity remains imprisoned by its crocodilian, primitive essence, having only learned to approach the killing of its own kind rationally.
Metropolis begins and ends with the phrase “The mediator between the head and the hands must be the heart,” and perhaps now, almost 100 years later, this remains humanity’s only hope. Yesakova’s works, at first glance, may not tug at the viewer’s heartstrings or evoke a visceral emotional response. They do not scream about war but rather assert the inevitability of death as its consequence. In addressing the mind first, they reveal the depth of their sorrow only upon contemplation.
[1] Simon Denny, Worker Cage Document Reliefs, 2020, at Fine Arts, Sydney. Online: https://www.moussemagazine.it/magazine/simon-denny-worker-cage-document-reliefs-at-fine-arts-sydney-2020/
[2] George Grosz: “Zu meinen neuen Bildern,” in: Das Kunstblatt, vol. 5, 1921, p. 14.
200th or dvukhsotyi (Двухсотый)
By Elena Voronovich
On Sofiia Yesakova’s Exhibition Black Wall and series Blind Spot 2.1 – 2.100.
Icon means picture. Borrowed from Greek, the term generally refers to the pictorial representation, the material external image, traditionally known as a panel painting. As such, it differs fundamentally from our ideas of immaterial internal images, which derive from the Latin term imago. As a Christian cult picture that became established between the 4th and early 8th centuries, primarily in the Eastern Church, the icon, which follows in the traditionof ancient panel paintings, is revered as the true picture–the Vera Ikon. In sacred spaces, icons are regarded as “not painted pictures”, “pictures of heavenly origin, ”and“ the seat of the divine being. It is the ritual that prescribes clear rules, instructions and order for both the production and handling of the cult picture. The icon, the picture used in worship, appeals to the viewer. It makes a promise. It promises something. It promises nothing less than the appearance of a miracle through the picture. In the cult, at the centre of which the icons stand, the constant repetition of homage to the picture takes place, which presupposes the presence in the picture of what the picture shows us. In this respect, every cult picture fundamentally contradicts the essence of the picture, whose existence is always based on being something other than what it shows. The iconostasis, the “revered and much-kissed” wall of pictures that separates the altar area from the nave in Orthodox churches, signifies the drawing of a boundary line that establishes the sacred space, which is usually oriented towards the east.
This is where revelation is expected. It is an inaccessible space that differsfrom the profane space. A space that can only be approached in devotion or prayer. The arrangement of the icons on the wall follows strict rules. At the centre of the wall is the royal door, which potentially grants access and becomes the place of the expected revelation.
In the exhibition Black Wall, exhibition space becomes a kind of oratory. A place of contemplation, where we display 98 panels by Ukrainian artist Sofiia Yesakova from the series Blind Spot 2.1. – 2.100., which enter into dialogue with a sound piece created especially for the exhibition by German sound artist Sascha Kregel. An artistic dialogue that raises questions about contemporary art in the face of the ongoing terror of war and the darkness that it brings into our present, presented for the first time at umbrella.
For months, Sofiia Yesakova produced 100 almost identical picture panels in repetitive, monotonous work processes. In this contemplative work, the artist finds a way to intensively engage with the war, its horrors and its dynamics. A wall of pictures is formed on the north side of the exhibition space from 98 picture panels created using icon painting techniques and reminiscent of icons, i.e. Christian cult pictures, in their composition. Where the sun never shines, where no revelation is to be expected, the Black Wall emerges and denies the viewer access to another world. It promises him nothing. This wall is opaque. Our gaze bounces off this wall of pictures. It reaches a dead end. Here, we are not looked atby the true face. Instead of the Vera Icon, which traditionally shines out at us from icons, the empty black picture panels multiple-fold hold up a mirror to us. What we see is our own face. It is reflected in nothingness, in the emptiness of the black, faceless icon, and reveals the horror. The picture wall becomes a picture front, a tableau of horror, of which we become a part at the moment when our reflection looks back at us from there. The sacred format is”desecrated”as the artist says, and transferred into a secular narrative in which both the individual panels and the entire wall of pictures are to be understood as a“visualised report of loss”and a“silent scream”. What the Black Wall shows is that representation can only fail, or perhaps must fail, in the face of the horrors of war.
From across the room, from the gallery on the south side of the exhibition space, the sound enters the room and fills it. The tonal systems created in Sascha Kregel's sound are not based on harmonic relationships between tones. Instead, he uses the surfaces and lines of drawings as a basis for creating his tonal ambiences, which are more random than planned and consist of arrhythmic minimal patterns, resonance fields and recurring noise. The resulting sound fields are mostly resonant. They are resonance fields formed by a collection of tonest hat are constantly moving themselves. Another essential aspect of Sascha Kregel’s sound is noise, which constantly present in every type of electronically generated sound–audible or inaudible–and, from technical perspective, becomes an indispensable part of the sound as a background. Contrary to the usual effort to minimize noise in favor of audibility, it is repeatedly brought to the forefront here, lending the sound depth and texture. In a constant alternation in which dark sound fields and latent noise sometimes come to the fore and sometimes recede into the background, and in the difference to the recurring interferer noise, the sound emerges and forms a dark, threatening wall of sound in the room, a sound space from which the exhibition visitor cannot escape. The listener is confronted with mostly monotonous soundscapes in which conciliatory harmonies only briefly emerge. Harmonies that, before they can calm the listener, are either cancelled out by interference noises or by the apparent nothingness of the permanent and audible noise, thus enabling a sound experience that is an audible response to Sofiia Yesakova's wall of pictures.
A large oak bench is placed in front of the picture wall and becomes an indispensable part of the exhibition. It invites visitors to stay, to see and to listen. Silently it urges them: Sit down, rest your tired legs until you don’t know what hit you.
by Ulrike Kregel
Interview for Goldrausch Künstlerinnenprojekt, 2024
The role of information in our time is an important topic in your art. Why?
I'm interested in how information is communicated on social media. One might think that we know everything nowadays, but that’s not true. It’s essential to look at information critically, and it’s difficult to figure out what actually corresponds to the truth. The war in Ukraine has made this topic even more urgent for me.
How does this become art?
I create conceptual art and draw on a lot of literature that discusses violence and war. I'm also interested in the parallels between military and religious systems. In the military, people often speak of a “holy war” and promise a better life after death, which is very similar to religion. In my art, I try to speak about violence and war in a very structured, emotionless language. Only in this way can we truly understand what’s happening.
What materials do you use?
I often use wood, which I prepare in the same way as for icon painting. But there’s no physicality, no icon. I also work with drawings based on designs of concentration camps. If you see my works without knowing what they’re about, you might think they are Minimal Art. But once you understand the context, the perception changes.
How has the war in Ukraine changed your art?
I had already been working on the themes of violence and religion before. When the war broke out, I couldn't think about art at all at first. Then I started searching for ways to talk about the war and decided to use this very rational language. My art is not just about the war in Ukraine—rather, I try to address the mechanisms of war and violence as such.
By Beate Scheder