Olena Pronkina – The Adaptation Diary

Exhibition’s curator: Tatiana Takáčová
Exhibition’s opening: 1. 3. 2023 / 7 p.m.
Exhibition’s duration: 2. 3. 2022 — 15. 4. 2023
Location: Šopa Gallery, Hlavná 40, Košice
Opening hours: WED – FRI / 3 – 6 p.m., SAT / 1 – 6 p.m.

With her captivating painting, Olena Pronkina draws us into stories in which scenes from her real life intertwine with parallel dream worlds. Color, a painting technique reminiscent of a fresco and suggestive environments or compositions will attract our curiosity with positive anticipation. But the melancholy-emptied faces and the inquisitively almost longingly lengthening limbs of the monumental shapeless figures indicate the experience of other stories

Violent loss of home, uprootedness, grief, and attributes of globalization that bear little resemblance to the familiar home mingle in this emotional-visual process of adaptation to a new environment. The ceramic heads bring us back to the position of a distant spectator, observing unfamiliar faces caught in this state of trance, in a nightmare, longing to emerge and wake up from this dream.

Olena Pronkina (*1988) 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. 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.

This residency is supported by the Creative Europe programme. The residency program is supported using public funding by Slovak Arts Council.
The residency is organized in collaboration with Meet Factory in the Czech Republic, hablarenarte: in Spain and Visual Culture Research Center, in Ukraine.