Art Rotterdam 2026, Katja Pilipenko

27.03.2026 – 29.03.2026 | Booth L2 / New Art Section, curated by Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu

At the center of Katja Pilipenko’s work are time, memory and ideology. She shows how stories, images and media shape political reality. And how the past is retold to justify the present. In The Other Russia Pilipenko combines drawings of covers from popular Russian time travel novels with well known anti war poems. The often violent and nostalgic fantasies of these books meet texts that clearly reject war. The work shows the gap between imperial longing and a cultural memory that understands war as a catastrophe. The Popadanets Calendar continues this idea. The calendars begin on February 24, 2022 and move backwards into a Soviet shaped visual world. Old patterns, historical images and familiar visual codes show how nostalgia becomes politically effective. Time does not appear as progress but as a retreat into an idealized past. The kinetic sculture Hand (Untitled), adds the role of myth and media repetition. The slowly rotating hand quotes the gesture of the clairvoyant Baba Vanga. A figure shaped into a political symbol through images and stories. The work shows how collective belief and media images reinforce each other. Together the three works show a society moving in a loop of past, propaganda and promises of the future. Pilipenko shows how ideologies are shaped not only through politics but also through images, popular culture and collective narratives.

Photo Credit: Frank Hanswijk