Olena Pronkina
Olena Pronkina was born in 1988 in Tashkent,Uzbekistan and grew up in Kyiv,Ukraine. In 2013 she received a Master’s degree in Monumental Arts from the Kyiv State Institute of Decorative Applied Arts and Design named after Mychailo Boichuk. Since 2014, she has participated in several solo and group exhibitions and residencies in Ukraine and Europe. In May 2022 Olena Pronkina received a stipend from the German art institution Kunstverein Ost (KVOST) in Berlin. She became the first recipient to receive the Claus Michaletz Preis offered by the Secco Pontanova Foundation. The stipend included an artist-in-residence program as well as Olena Pronkina’s solo exhibition in KVOST Dew in the Sun, which was opened during Berlin Art Week 2022. She is interested in figurativeness primarily through anthropomorphism, namely, through a person. For her, it is an inexhaustible source of visual options for creating worlds and finding a place for yourself in these worlds.
Adaptation Diary
2022–2023,
acrylic on paper
The Adaptation Diary by Olena Pronkina refers to the artist’s personal story of being forced to move to another country in search of refuge at the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. She depicts the experience of losing home and adapting to a new, unfamiliar environment in a series of paintings, where real-life scenes interlace with fictional worlds, and the protagonists seem to operate between a dream and reality. Their confused gazes, apparent helplessness and loneliness, and sometimes deliberate body transformations contrast with the cold spaces and melancholic landscapes. Following the usual rituals and scenarios from their previous lives, they try to find a connection with their past lives and their place in the new realities. Referring to her personal experience, the artist testifies to the collective trauma associated with the experience of loss and forced relocation.
Sorry No Rooms Available
October 8–November 12
Where Are We Now, After All Those Endlessly Repeated Words?
Curated by Petro Ryaska, Daria Shevtsova
