HANNOVER.- In her work, Kateryna Lysovenko (b. 1989 in Odessa) deals with power structures and ideologies underlying the Soviet past and the omnipresent war in Ukraine.

Lysovenko explores the language of conflict and the comparisons of humans to animals deployed by wartime propaganda in categorical terms, especially when it comes to acts of violence.

Her figurative works often feature ghostly figures, animals and hybrid creatures. They could be borrowed from mythology, hail from dreams or emerge from the depths of memory. The images address trauma and evoke a longing for peace, harmony and security.

Room 1 — Transformation

Lysovenko’s vibrant figurative paintings are inhabited by hybrid creatures, mermaids, centaurs, giant spiders and trees that hail from mythology, folklore, and collective memory.

The artist does not understand these transformations as dehumanizing. Rather, it is an act of rejection of violence and injustice. The dream of safe havens and spaces of belonging and empathy is one of the central themes of Lysovenko’s practice. Dream for a Safe Place for the Unsaved (2024), reflects the need for a place for those whose lives have been made impossible by structural violence. Lysovenko focuses on vulnerability and resistance in the face of continuing onslaught and destruction, and points to those affected: the victims of political extremism and religious and ideological oppression. The artist decentralizes the heroic perspective of the protagonists of dominant narratives that perpetuate the patriarchal order. In her compositions, this approach translates into breaking the visual conventions of depicting both spatial relations as well as those of cause and effect – neither of which govern her monumental painterly works. Non-linear and organic, the formal language employed here highlights the dynamics and transformations of the figures as they come to life.

In the series Mermaid Embryos (2024) and the work One More Mermaid, Lysovenko blurs the distinction between the external world and the procreative, maternal organism of a mermaid by depicting the process of becoming and the connectivity of bodies in an affectionate manner.

This approach can also be understood as an act of reclaiming that addresses the possibility of emancipating from patriarchy. In It’s hard to say what happens with a man, when the land becomes a mother (2024), Lysovenko deploys intense painterly gestures to conjure up new spaces of agency where the existing laws and conditions as we know them no longer apply.

Room 2 — Wartezimmer (Waiting Room)

Among the central themes in Lysovenko’s artistic and research practice is the analysis of the intertwining of images and ideologies. Taking ancient myths, historical themes and present-day ideologies as her point of departure, she examines how motifs and contexts of reasoning are materially and discursively reflected in images as well as what types of image politics emerge from them. Totalitarian regimes create images and narratives as strategic instruments of domination, in order to conceal the grievances and cruelties of the present underneath an illusionary vision and to establish seemingly unambiguous patterns of interpretation. Lysovenko, on the other hand, understands her painting as a text that is ambiguous. Her imagined depictions of the future go against historical reality and counter the process of forgetting by giving the absence a face. In her four- part work Wartezimmer (Waiting Room) (2024), she created the image of a blissful life-to-come in which victims of totalitarian regimes inhabit a future realm. The series portrays artists whose work and lives were robbed of a future by the political circumstances of their time. Lysovenko depicted Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler, Charlotte Salomon and Felix Nussbaum at the age of 70 – an age they never lived to see. The Ukrainian artist Viacheslav Mashnitskiy, abducted by Russian occupiers in Kherson in 2022, is also depicted at the same age. The uncertainty of his fate is representative of a generation of artists faced with the conflict between the hope for survival and painful losses. They have to find ways to deal with the anger and grief over work and experiences that would never come about. In times of flight, mobilization, and deportation, the waiting room – at a train station or in one’s own mind – becomes an important place for Lysovenko. A kind of zone of uncertainty and of urgency, where different perspectives on experience intersect while their repetition remains a constant – without regard to a specific place.

Room 3 — Paradise

In her work Altar to the World of My Dreams (2020), Lysovenko created an entrance to a utopian space of equality that questions the relationship between knowledge, power, and freedom as represented in Christian iconography and ancient myths and disrupts their traditional concepts while preserving the formal structure of the multi part altarpiece. Her imagery, a critical recontextualization of the inherited Soviet realist tradition, opens up a future-oriented space of plurality in which relationships between the human and the natural, as well as between gender and sexuality are con- tinuously reinterpreted. In an attempt to counter the logic of oppression, the artist reflects on memories of trauma and the experiences of displaced persons. Lysovenko dreams of a world in which there is safety for the unredeemable and offers utopia as a method of criticizing reality.

For her, painting is a language that can be either instrumentalized or liberated, and Lysovenko uses it to probe the possibilities of utopian imagination. Her practice explores lost landscapes - spaces made inaccessible by human activity or authoritarian regimes. This loss of safe places reveals a transformation of lived realities characterized by changing demands and needs. In Sanatorium for Displaced Creatures (Chernobyl) (2023), the (memorial) site that became uninhabitable after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986 becomes a new home, reclaimed by plants and animals. Lynx and other species once thought extinct now roam the exclusion zone.

While new life and phenomena emerge from the cracks between what was lost and what was saved, the artist acknowledges that each person carries a void within them. For Lysovenko, this is connected to the refusal to let the destroyed fall into oblivion. In Cemetery Garden (2022), memory becomes the seed for a safe space. The artist often uses the image of a garden in which living beings, ideas and places survive and new communities can flourish. The urgent question of responsibility and care also resonates in the works The Sun of Another World Rises (2024) and Ruins Are Growing (2023) which depict modes of existence rooted in connectedness.

Room 4 — War

In her works, Kateryna Lysovenko reflects both on the recent political upheavals in Ukraine following Russia’s attack on this young democracy as well as on her personal dealings with these events, which she experienced up close. At the same time, her works confront universal questions and experiences. Lysovenko is concerned with deconstructing war not as an accidental catastrophe and abrupt chaos, but as a form of imperialist politics. The works on display approach the topic from multiple perspectives and shed light on how political power structures as well as traumas are deeply embedded in the linguistic and social practices.

Her practice strives to create an awareness of war’s complexities and to reflect on the mechanisms of power – both historically and artistically. Lysovenko’s painterly language is a space of radical and emancipatory negotiation.

In works such as Are They Humans? (2023) and People Are Geopolitical Animals (2023), the artist explores the comparisons of humans to animals deployed by wartime propaganda. In doing so, she taps into the violence that often lies hidden in parables, myths and fairy tales featuring animals.

In Victory and Glory (2022), Lysovenko reflects on the body as material and resource in totalitarian regimes through the rhetoric of dehumanization. In Body of the Empire (2023), the landscape is seen as a body marked by furrows of pain.

The watercolor series Surviving (2022) portrays wounds and losses embodied in an elementary and existential formal language. The scenes breathe the gravity of the fates and reframe the question of resilience and the possibility of a resistant utopia.