At the centre of “Primordial Forum: Lost Languages” is a wall that has outlived the messages it once carried.
Lucia Sotnikova’s long-term project “Primordial Forum” began with the photographic docu- mentation of a former fifteen-metre advertising wall in the artist’s hometown. For years, the wall carried cultural, social, and political announcements. It stood at human eye level, close enough to be touched and read in passing. After analogue poster surfaces disappeared from the city, the wall remained: repainted silver each year, emptied of its public function, yet still marked by rusting staples, nails, abrasions, and overpainted traces of previous communication.
In 2020, Sotnikova presented a photographic copy of the wall at 1:1 scale at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, making the support itself visible as the work. Since then, the wall has returned in different forms: as a built object, an image surface, and a spatial structure. Made of wood and plywood, painted silver and fitted with real staples and nails, it has become a recurring apparatus through which images, memories, and public residues are being transferred.
For “Primordial Forum: Lost Languages”, Sotnikova creates a site-specific installation at Kun- stverein Heppenheim, that is located in a former bakery space. The room still bears the signs of earlier use: cracked floor tiles, scratched lampshades, worn surfaces, and minor damage accumulated over time. These marks, like those on the original wall, point to actions whose content can no longer be reconstructed. They preserve evidence without explanation.
Sotnikova covered the windows of the Kunstverein with fragments of the silver wall. The exhibition cannot be seen from outside; it has to be entered physically. This intervention turns the room inward, as if the visitor were stepping into the wall itself. The installation becomes a second layer of the architecture—a field of surfaces, traces, and interrupted communication.
Inside the space are three large-format wall fragments, almost entirely covered with photo- graphic posters. Only at the edges does the underlying silver support remain visible, as if the works had been cut from a larger public surface. They retain the visual language of street posters—pasted paper, folds, overlaps, ruptures—but contain no text, date, or visible source. They suggest announcement while withholding verbal information.
This relation between image and support continues within the photographs. Sotnikova works with found digital images, including material from her ongoing series “Stage Lights, Kitchen Nights”, for which she collects photographs from second-hand sales platforms such as eBay. Made by private sellers trying to present objects attractively with ordinary means, these images reveal advertising from its most domestic and improvised side. Sotnikova projects such images onto her own body and photographs them again. The body becomes a tempo- rary screen, while the projected image adjusts itself to living form; real shadows enter into the photographed ones, and the boundary between surface, figure, and image becomes unstable.
The reverse side of the wall fragments covering the windows remains hidden from the main exhibition space. Concealed behind plastic sheeting, it is filled with green light, which gradu- ally changes the atmosphere of the room as darkness falls outside. The light spreads slowly through the space, giving it the suspended, transitional quality of an underground passage.
Bringing together image, object, light, and architecture, “Primordial Forum: Lost Languages”reflects on lost languages, previous communication, and the unstable relation between image and its carrier. The exhibition does not decode its traces. It allows them to remain active: as surfaces that continue to carry meaning after the message has disappeared.
