Ksenia Pedan at Cell Project Space

Artist: Ksenia Pedan

Exhibition title: Reversion

Curated by: Adomas Narkevičius

Venue: Cell Project Space, London, UK

Date: September 15 – November 19, 2023

Photography: Jonas Balsevičius / images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Cell Project Space, London

Reversion, Ksenia Pedan’s ambitious solo exhibition, presents a site-embedded psychological space of newly commissioned installations and paintings. Breaking open the notion of ‘interior’, Reversion explores how the arrangement of things relates to disorderly feelings, navigating the interstice between ‘neutral’ surface and psychological depth, requested function and unsolicited expression.

A numbed civic interior brushes against the promise of sincerity in self-expression. Densely-coated vertical strips design themselves into serial schemas, and glumpy vision gets stuck in their thickness, right before a flicker in its eye. Moving rhythmically, colour fields diffuse emotions across the room, punctured by recurring darkened lacuna-clots. It is as if a private language knows it has become public signage before uttering its first words. Patterns of ‘the self ’ decorating the room, splashes of colour gain the appearance of recessed reactions to crises.

Paintings and installations, in reflection on art’s entertainment value, negotiate existential concerns from within the schematic language of standardised spaces that ordinarily host them. Reversion is a case of interior decor after the breakdown of social decorum. Against the backdrop of the present’s demands for the expressive drama of grief, it acts as a ‘neutral’ holding environment for misarranged things and underperformed feelings.

-Curator Adomas Narkevičius

Ksenia Pedan (b. 1986, Ukraine) is an artist currently based in London and Stockholm, primarily working in sculpture and installation. She graduated from Goldsmiths, University of London, and has exhibited extensively as part of an artist duo with Ben Burgis. Pedan’s installations constitute spatial contexts, with sculptural elements contributing to hybrid spaces of domesticity and publicity that often facilitate performative actions. These installations often function as stage sets for contextualised live performances, challenging the glossy perception of art spaces through their reference to the entropy and decay of environments, objects, and feelings. Selected solo/duo exhibitions include Forde, Geneva, 2019; Baltic Triennial 13, kim? Contemporary Art Centre, Riga, 2018; Dortmund Kustverein, 2017; Union Pacific, London, 2015. Among recent group exhibitions are CAC Brétigny, Brétigny-sur-Orge, 2022; Varberg Konsthall, Varberg, 2021; Drei, Cologne, 2018; Wschód Gallery, Warsaw; Raven Row, London, 2017

Generously supported by the Cockayne Foundation and the Henry Moore Foundation.