Sabotage, the intervention staged by the Office for Comparative Reality at Pushkin House in London between July and October 2023, transformed the bar space into a disorienting media environment. Combining video, graphic elements, sound, and installation, the project addressed the visual and informational ecology of contemporary war propaganda, particularly the fragmented and manipulative flows circulating through digital networks. Within this environment, Katja Butorina contributed the video component of the installation, which played a central role in establishing the work’s perceptual atmosphere.

Katja Butorina’s practice frequently explores communication and perception beyond strictly human-centered frameworks, often engaging with technological systems as mediators between bodies, environments, and data. In Sabotage, this sensibility translated into a visual language that mirrored the unstable and recursive character of contemporary information streams. The video element operated less as an autonomous artwork than as a circulating signal within the installation. The piece did not have a separate title and was conceived as an integral component of the overall project.

Katja Butorina’s video employed looping structures, glitch-based visual textures, and fragmented imagery reminiscent of cartographic and data-based interfaces. It generated a shifting visual field that echoed the instability of digital media environments and the circulation of manipulated information, translating complex political and informational phenomena into an engaging artistic form. Rather than presenting a linear narrative, the work unfolded as a dynamic field of signals, in which images appeared and dissolved, evoking the constant reconfiguration of information typical of online media spaces.

The installation itself brought together a number of interconnected elements: the looped video created by Katja Butorina, wallpaper composed of glitched textures resembling maps and metadata, a flag generated by a neural network, ink portraits depicting the bodies of Russian soldiers abandoned by their commanders in Ukraine, and the sound of a grand piano in the process of tuning. Together these components produced a deliberately unsettling environment. Distortion, imitation, and falsification emerged as central motifs, pointing to the ways aggressive media landscapes operate by shaping perception and suppressing critical awareness. In the course of the intervention, the architectural minimalism of the Pushkin House bar was further transformed through the introduction of vegetation typical of marshes and swamps, reinforcing the sense of immersion in a landscape of distorted signals.

Within this environment, Katja Butorina’s video played a key spatial and perceptual role. Positioned among the other elements of the installation, it contributed to the transformation of the exhibition space into what might be described as an informational swamp. The glitched cartographic surfaces, slowly shifting piano tones, and continuously circulating video created a dense sensory atmosphere in which viewers were immersed rather than simply observing discrete artworks. Katja Butorina’s video functioned as a visual current running through the installation, shaping how the audience navigated and interpreted the environment.

One of the strengths of Katja Butorina’s contribution lies in the way it avoids direct didacticism. The exhibition addresses a politically urgent subject - the circulation of militarist propaganda in the context of Russia’s war against Ukraine; yet Katja Butorina’s video does not reduce this issue to explicit messaging. Instead, it foregrounds the sensory conditions under which propaganda operates: the instability of images, the layering of information, and the difficulty of distinguishing signal from manipulation. By shifting attention from the content of propaganda to the perceptual infrastructures that enable it, the work invites viewers to reflect on how contemporary media environments reshape the ways we interpret reality.

Seen in this context, Katja Butorina’s video operates both as a component of the installation and as a conceptual hinge within the project. Through its looping temporal structure and glitch-based visual language, Katja Butorina’s work embodies the exhibition’s central metaphor of a distorted informational landscape in which signals circulate endlessly, identities become unstable, and perception itself becomes a site of struggle. By embedding her moving-image work within this multisensory environment, Katja Butorina contributes a layer of temporal and perceptual complexity that anchors the installation’s broader exploration of contemporary media warfare.