Lada Nakonechna. Travelling Head or Conditioned Reflexes No. 2 (tolerance, compromise, conformism). 2023

Work description

This installation continues a project that began as part of the group exhibition “Kaleidoscope of History. Ukrainian Art 1912–2023,” the first part of which took place at the Albertinum in Dresden. Nakonechna created Conditioned Reflexes No. 2 specifically for Museum De Fundatie in Zwolle, the Netherlands.

Both parts share a common theme: the study of Western public collections of socialist realist art and their reinterpretation today. They also feature the same central object—a plaster head with truncated edges, typically used by art academy students to study 3D modeling and depict volume through light and shadow. Nakonechna covered the plains of the head with mirrors and suspended it upside-down from the ceiling, like a disco ball. In her concept, the mirrored head acts as a tool for reflecting reality—once considered the artist’s main task under Marxist-Leninist aesthetics. Instead, the head’s facets reflect light from spotlights and cast glimmers onto portraits from the local collection, encouraging viewers to look at them distantly and indirectly.

While the Albertinum featured portraits of “ordinary heroes” (worker, student, nurse, etc.) from East German socialist realism, at Museum de Fundatie—an institution unfamiliar with socialist realism or the communist past—Nakonechna displayed part of a massive (59-item) collection of portraits of a single person: Dirk Hannema, donor of the collection and former museum director. A celebrated patron of the arts, immortalized in numerous portraits of varying styles and techniques, Hannema’s biography also includes facts such as collaboration during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands in World War II and the misattribution of paintings to Johannes Vermeer. Nakonechna’s “Travelling Head” highlighted the local history of the art collection, its former owner, and the memory of him. Thus, the artist—living outside Ukraine since 2022—analyzes Western museum collections, uncovering their complex histories and posing difficult questions to local audiences and their comfortable perspectives.

Nakonechna’s institutional critique continued at MdbK, Leipzig. But her work Discursive Trap of Socialist Realism or How to Look at a Self-Confident Person from the GDR. An Intervention in the Gesichter der Arbeit Section of the Exhibition “The 20th And 21st Century” had to be removed the very next day after a complaint from the relatives of the artist whose work she reinterpreted.