The exhibition explores the metaphors, social scripts, gestures, and rituals through which we understand and process emotions.
a word
a word for a thought
a thought for a memory
a memory for a scent
a scent for a photograph
a photograph of a place
lantern jacket leaves
pearls pearls necklace
a run in tights
nylon
a note in the phone
untouchable untouchable
I pull I pull I pull I pull
pulling pulling
to pull it out
I can’t I can’t
What metaphors and social scripts shape how we understand and deal with emotions? How do we mark a breakup through gestures and rituals?
Hair Grows as Long as Trees began as a series of ceramic object-tools that have lost their intended function. Central to the work is the impossibility of separating lived experience from the body. Among the objects are scissors, which the artist uses as a metaphor following a painful breakup, referring to a familiar social ritual: hair can be cut, but lived experience cannot be removed through the same gesture.
Moving across different media, the artist reflects on the body as a form that can no longer return to its earlier shape. This gives rise to another kind of wholeness — one that includes the experience of damage.
The space unfolds through different stages of a painful experience: from melancholy, through encounters with established ideas of how breakups are experienced, towards acceptance and recovery. Accompanied by poetic, diary-like notes, the artist offers a small journey into one’s own vulnerability. She opens a dialogue with the narratives that shape how we understand emotions, draws on folkloric imagery, and creates a space for observing the duration of inner processes and their gradual transformation.
Hotel Continental — Art Space in Exile dedicated to Ukrainian and exiled artists in Berlin. We work toward peace, freedom, democracy and human rights with the means of culture — through exhibitions, residencies, performances, festivals and the simple insistence on showing up.
Working across graphic and expanded media — including printmaking, text, and spatial installation — the artist explores displacement and intimacy shaped by the experience of migration, with a particular focus on relationships between people within and beyond this context. Aglaya reflects on the body as a form that can no longer return to its earlier shape. This gives rise to the formation of another kind of wholeness — one that includes the experience of damage.
Working across drawing, painting and installation, her practice circles displacement, memory, and the territories between Ukraine and Europe. Recent solo: Archipiélago at PORTAL 11.
Hotel Continental — Art Space in Exile is a cultural venue in Berlin offering spaces for the creation and presentation of art, educational events, community projects, and corporate events. We are located at Elsenstraße 87, 12435 Berlin. You can reach us from S-Treptow or by bus M43 or M194.
