Kateryna Lysovenko at Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg

Lysovenko’s painterly intervention in the Ring Gallery of Salzburger Kunstverein unfolds as a loop. Realism is always already unreal (she insists); it only exists as an attempt to show what structures life but does not immediately appear; the forces that build and unbuild the human; the discourses that determine who counts as a body, who belongs to a home, and who deserves to live.

For this site-specific commission, the Ring Gallery’s circular architecture serves as the conceptual and formal armature of the work. The space might read as a gut or a chamber of digestion. At its beginning cells drift across the surface: blood cells, organ cells, fragments of life before identity. For Lysovenko, this level of cellular life precedes the question of citizenship, belonging, or recognition. From the cellular field, the human emerges, but the emergence of the human coincides with the emergence of desire (inseparable from libido, the energy that drives both imagination and survival).

Gradually, she adds creatures that hover at the edge of legibility. Are they human? Do they “deserve” life? The question itself is the violence that speaks to the central problem of this exhibition: dehumanization.

Lysovenko paints the dehumanized as lovable. Soft, tender, vulnerable, resisting the ideological gaze that would render them disposable.

Dehumanization is shown not as an abstract evil but as a mechanism that justifies killing in the name of saving. She calls one part of the mural Feeding Death. It is a portrait of a fascist family. Fascism, as she suggests, is not an alien eruption but a domestic arrangement. Around the dinner table, death is fed. The painting stages fascism as cannibalistic and suicidal at once: a regime that devours others while hollowing itself out. Following, the Cyclone of Fascism is painted as a force so total that the body can no longer hold its outline. The human form, once triumphant in its emergence, is scattered across the wall.

At the end of the loop, something tender begins again. In the ruins, the idea of the human returns—life insists. Something fragile and hopeful begins to grow again. The human appears, and reappears—again and again.

Within the broader framework of CAPTCHA Realism, Lisovenko’s intervention sharpens the programme’s central question: what does it mean to be acknowledged as human? In a world where recognition is mediated by borders, ideologies, and increasingly by technological systems that sort and verify. Lisovenko answers with a loop. There is no linear narrative here. History turns back on itself.

Commissioned and produced by Salzburger Kunstverein.

The exhibition by Kateryna Lysovenko is generously supported by the ERSTE Foundation.