Where Do Pigeons Sleep?

Through visual studies of urban pigeons, Oksana Sadovenko (a Ukrainian artist living in Bratislava) addresses fundamental themes of loss of home, nomadism, and the search for identity. Her work began with an investigation into the places where pigeons sleep. This imagined “pigeon dormitory” soon became a metaphor for a safe shelter— something that, in the ruins and crevices of a world torn apart by conflict, we all long for regardless of species. The artist works strongly with shifts in scale: the pigeon approaches the human in terms of value, attention, and size—or rather humans are given the opportunity to view themselves and others from a pigeon’s perspective. Through this exhibition, we can experience something that might be compared to an interspecies metamorphosis. It may even lead some of us to reconsider our attitudes toward these creatures, surrounded by many myths, and to develop a more considerate relationship with them. Oksana’s expressive authorial approach effortlessly transcends the contextual and physical limits of painting. This is partly due to her experience with the street art scene in Kyiv, Ukraine, which is also connected to the beginnings of her interest in the living habitats of pigeons. Perhaps this background explains her spontaneously monumental yet materially modest way of working, as well as her courage to present her work in the context of brownfields and demolition sites in Bratislava. She currently dreams, for example, of an exhibition space situated on construction scaffolding, capable of directly addressing passersby. Her conceptual thinking is also linked to an awareness of processuality—the possibility that a work may deteriorate or disappear under the influence of the physical properties of materials or weather conditions. She has, for instance, asked how it might be possible to paint on an invisible support, which led her to create monumental pseudo-murals specifically for Pragovka Gallery on non-woven, translucent textile. Equally enriching is her movement along the boundary between object and painting, between surface and spatial form. In this way, her work enters into dialogue with movements such as Supports/Surfaces or analytical painting. Both of these now-historical art movements—the former emerging after 1968 in France, the latter associated primarily with Italy in the 1980s—contributed to redefining painting not merely as an aesthetic category, but as an intellectual and emotional stance that is unafraid to step beyond the safe territory of the frame into the space of galleries, industrial architecture, and urban streets alike.