28/03/2026
Katja Pilipenko — In the New Art Section, curated by Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu, Galerie (Hamburg) highlights a solo booth with works by Katja Pilipenko. including her drawing series „The Other Russia“. For these works, Pilipenko appropriates the covers of popadantsy books, a post Soviet literary genre in which protagonists travel back in time to change the course of history. These stories often reflect dissatisfaction with the country’s past and fantasies of Soviet or imperial restoration. Pilipenko redraws the often kitschy and violent book covers and combines them with canonical Russian anti war poetry, widely known as part of a shared cultural memory for those for whom war is fundamentally unacceptable. By bringing these elements together, her drawings confront two conflicting imaginaries of history and war within Russian society, exposing a deep social division. Pilipenko is an artist from Moscow, based in Hamburg, whose practice is shaped by Russia’s transition from post-Soviet democracy to an authoritarian media regime. In her work, she examines how our understanding of reality is shaped by media, language and image-making, and how myths and ideologies take shape within politics and society. Working across installation, video, printmaking, and sculpture, she investigates how power and control operate through technologies, narratives, and collective practices. Explore more work from the booth in the online catalogue on : catalog.galleryviewer.com [link in our bio].
