Artists

Kateryna Aliinyk, Dominika Trapp

Press release

KATERYNA ALIINYK AND DOMINIKA TRAPP “There is a notion of the almost over-ripe knowledge and memories that, if not plucked in time, will fall and rot.” This closing line of a collection of texts by Kateryna Aliinyk titled Who Else Eats Life with the Spoons? might easily serve as a motto for this constellation of works bound together by shared sensibilities and overlapping narratives. Through their close attention to landscape, Kateryna Aliinyk and Dominika Trapp allow for a range of relationships to emerge, evoking profound sensory and spiritual experience. Trapp’s artificial terrains host fictive, dystopian scenes and serve as choreographed stages where latent violence and entanglement unfold through intricate detail. Aliinyk turns to another space-time: nature’s infinity and its persistent capacity for regeneration despite war and destruction. Amid conflicting feelings of fear, admiration, and alienation, a form of radical joy emerges.

War has given Kateryna Aliinyk a new lens through which to view the landscape. In her recent work, she moves away from directly depicting devastation; instead, nature appears as an autonomous force, unfolding according to its own timescale. Her key term, “abundance,” denotes both biodiversity and a complex condition of being a guest in nature: a profound sense of awe where the moon and birds become protective anchors. For Dominika Trapp, vulnerability is a generative condition. Her furred, visceral forms and birdtraps that blend into the landscape — recurring motifs in her practice — become visual tropes of ambush and concealment. Occupying a liminal space between attraction and threat, the works evoke states of transition, caught between exposure and a sense of being enmeshed in structures of coercion and dependence. The exhibition guides viewers through tangled vines and thickets, landscapes charged with the possibility of a sudden rupture.

It unfolds through an intimate dynamic between what can be shared and what remains unshareable: embodied experience, private knowledge, and the challenge of individual agency. Moving between an affirmation of botanical resilience and a lingering sense of foreboding, the works navigate precarious states of awareness and endurance. Lívia Páldi, curator of the exhibition *Poem by Marianna Kiyanovska Translated from the Ukrainian by Oksana Lutsyshyna and Kevin Vaughn Dominika Trapp and Kisterem are supporting Medspot Foundation with a portion of the proceeds from the sale of the exhibited works. The foundation provides medical and psychological/mental health assistance to our fellow citizens in times of crisis. Starting in early 2022, it has been assisting internally displaced families, children, and chronically ill elderly people at the Ukrainian-Hungarian border, and since the fall, in the war-torn region of Transcarpathia.