KVOST STIPENDIUM 2022 . OLENA PRONKINA

KVOST is pleased to announce Olena Pronkina as the recipient of the KVOST Stipend 2022. She was chosen from a total of 82 applications.

The jury consisted of the artists Hortensia Mi Kafchin and Henrike Naumann as well the curating team Nathalie Hoyos & Rainald Schumacher and the founding directors of KVOST, Julia Rust and the curator Stephan Koal.

Olena Pronkina was born in 1988 in Uzbekistan and grew up in Ukraine. Her preferred media are painting and ceramics. Until Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, Pronkina lived and worked in Kyiv. Like many artists, she fled to the west of the country to Lviv and on to Bucharest.

Pronkina paints figuratively. She places her figures in a world she has constructed, depicting inner realities, feelings of belonging and strangeness in static, calm-looking scenarios. What was understood at the beginning of the 20th century as a glimpse into the unconscious and the psychic, today also reads as a glimpse beyond the surfaces. A glimpse that falls into an inner state of being, beyond the self-dramatizations and optimizations of outward appearances for the posts on the screens of social media.

The support and promotion of an artistic position from Ukraine is an important concern for the members of the jury and KVOST.

Like hardly any other event for decades, the war in Ukraine has provoked the question of what distinguishes a human being or what makes him an inhuman being in his cruelty. Pronkina’s paintings and sculptures do not answer this question, but they provoke the question of the inner self. Her works address existential questions of our human nature and condition. The alienating and enigmatic figures in the artist’s pictorial worlds, the mask-like heads of her ceramics point to a mystical, spiritual reality.

The stipend includes an artist-in-residence program as well as a solo exhibition in KVOST’s premises during this year’s Art Week Berlin.
KVOST STIPENDIUM 2022 . OLENA PRONKINA

taz / Kultur

“Kollateralschaden Kultur?”
Review by Tom Mustroph

Dialog between Generations . Belarusian Female Artists
at KVOST

taz.de
taz / Kultur

Our Space to Help

­Berlin art institutions are calling for a joint fundraising campaign at the Neue Nationalgalerie – for people fleeing Ukraine and arriving in our city.

The alliance is collecting monetary donations, power banks and mobile hotspots and is cooperating with Be an Angel e.V., who are committed to the sustainable integration of people with a refugee history.

The glass pavilion of the Neue Nationalgalerie will be a place of encounter, a vigil and a donation point from Saturday 5 March 2022, 10 am to Sunday 6 March 2022, midnight; there will be an open mic with numerous contributions from artists, actors and musicians.
Our Space to Help