Laktionova
Director, Editor, Visual artist
Unheritage (ongoing)
The Unheritage is a re-enactment of childhood memories from Mariupol (Ukraine), in which both landscapes and the totalitarian Soviet past play a large role.
During my residency at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in 2023–24, I collaborated with Dr. Wilfried Vetter, Senior Scientist at the Institute of Natural Sciences and Technology in the Arts (INTK), to analyse five 35mm photographic films found in a school completely destroyed during the war in Ukraine. The films had been left exposed to the elements. Their surfaces were partially covered with unidentified whitish materials.
Dr. Vetter conducted FTIR spectroscopy and stereo microscope analysis of the films, identifying chalk, cellulose fibres, sodium sulfate crystals, and layered paint chips — physical residue of a building that no longer exists. One composite microscope image was assembled from 113 separate photographs. Under that level of magnification, destruction becomes landscape: granular, abstract, radically unfamiliar, and strangely beautiful.
From these microscopic images I created a pixelation animation that opens my current film Ashes Settling in Layers on the Surface. The animation functions as a metaphor for forgetting and remembering — matter that is almost nothing, almost invisible, but still chemically present and identifiable. Scientific method became a way of witnessing what the eye alone cannot see.
Exhibitions
2025 - Cite International Des Arts Montmartre Open Studios, Paris (France)
2024 - AFAR: Topography of a Project, Bačva Gallery, Zagreb (Croatia)
2024 - DE/CODING TEXTILE, Künstlerhaus Vienna (Austria)
2024 - Solo exhibition Memory Practices, Anca Poterasu Gallery, Bucharest (Romania)
2023 - Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna (Austria)
MNagl2024.jpg)
DE/CODING TEXTILE, Künstlerhaus Vienna (Austria), 2024
Austria:
Romania:
Statement:
I spent three months in Vienna at the Academy of Contemporary Art working on a project. At the presentation of the project, the vice-rector called me and, while presenting the project and me, talked about the protests of Russians in Russia without making any light of the shelling in Ukraine. I was not given a word at the end. The presentation was not agreed with me.
My will is that words that support the Russians should not be spoken on behalf of me, on behalf of my works. Any dialogue will be possible only when Russia stops the war and Mariupol like other occupied cities and territories returns to Ukraine. I consider any attempt to place my name or my works on an equal footing with the Russian ones or in support of the Russians as manipulation and condemn it.
Russia is a terrorist state!