The installation For Sale. Tap water occasionally. Season 2 is part of an ongoing multilayered, research-based project investigating the current political and social situation in Eastern Ukraine.

The research is based on photographs and texts found on the Internet. All these sources originate from Alchevsk, my hometown, which is located in a region, occupied by Russian-backed separatists. For me this town symbolize many other places in Eastern Ukraine carrying the Soviet heritage, abandoned and weakened due to seven years of war.

All the photographs I used in this project are images of apartments in Alchevsk, which I have found in various real estate portals. These apartments were offered for sale at ridiculously low prices between June 2020 and April 2021. Many people fled during the first years of the war and left their apartments empty. Others, who cannot afford to move out of the region, hope to sell their houses so that they can leave. However, massive disruptions in infrastructure and the high number of apartments on sale caused a loss in property value and a total lack of demand.

The bilingual sound installation Planmässig. Reduziert (B сокращенном режиме. По графику) is based on original texts published on the official website of the new town administration between January 2016 and April 2021, informing citizens about water supply shortages. The Russian texts were translated to the German language by an AI translator available online and then spoken out by the AI voice generator.

The repetitive sound of male voices coming out of the speakers, placed in the water basins, is annoying and tiring. It sounds like there is no problem since the voices report about the water supply on a regular basis. The usual water demand of the town is around 24’000 m3, the average daily volume of water supply in the last seven years varied between 5’000 m3 and 13’000 m3. None of the districts, mentioned in the spoken text gets tap water every day. Storing water is one of the daily rituals of people living in this region and is considered to be a part of „normal“ life.

By enlarging fragments of the images and putting them together in the series Still Lifes (Натюрморты) I focus on a problem that is often overlooked. The collages from the series Interiors (Интерьеры) reveal a story of Alchevsk depicted in images of bathrooms, toilets, kitchens, corridors, living rooms, and bedrooms. The fragments of existing photographs, recomposed in new images, contain cultural codes and traces of historical experience and show the contradictions of the current situation.