Curated and written by Alica Sänger
Galerie Schugar Rotariu
In the exhibition Threshold, Nina Laguta and Tamara Turliun explore the material life of abandoned buildings. Against a backdrop of displacement, upheaval, and the slow passage of time, the works ask what happens when human presence recedes. When plaster begins to peel and metal to rust, a house is no longer merely a backdrop for human stories. Instead, its materiality comes to the fore: matter reveals itself as neither dead nor neutral, but follows its own tendencies and forces. Places once built as shelters for people gradually offer space to other forms of life as insects create micro-routes and plants colonize the edges of foundations. Rather than telling a story of loss or restoration, the exhibition lingers in this in-between space. The threshold appears not as an entrance or exit, but as a state – as a sensitivity to the more-than-human afterlife of architecture and to that suspended moment in which dwelling and memory merge into environment and ecology.

Laguta’s ceramic beings – somewhere between butterflies and embryonic forms – sit on the pedestals as if they have just landed and are now in the process of appropriating them. Formed from clay and porcelain, they unite different earths and firing temperatures in a single fragile body beneath a glazed surface.

Ceramics are notoriously unpredictable in the kiln. The material can break, warp, or shift, often in ways beyond the artist’s control. At times, it almost seems as if it decides for itself what form it will ultimately take. Within it, it carries the memory of having been extracted from the earth, industrially processed, and fired in a kiln—and simultaneously of that moment of material risk in which matter proves to be anything but inert. From the ceiling, cords of fabric, ceramic fragments, wax, and wild clay hang into the room, the latter collected by the artist herself in nature. They begin to sway when someone passes by, registering the viewers not as outside observers, but as wandering air pockets, as disturbances in a shared force field. Laguta’s forms demonstrate what feminist theory insists upon: that agency is distributed across bodies, objects, and atmospheres, and that humans are always just one actor among many. Turliun’s works press into the room as if they were roots breaking through walls, oozing resinous sap, while dome-like forms sprout from the corners like mushrooms. Formed from delicate wire frames and papier-mâché, the sculptures appear
particularly fragile, and traces of their creation, such as the warped paper and the discolored wire, remain visible. The objects can be interpreted as cocoons, organic forms,
or shed shells. The pulsating light of small LEDs inside suggests a
slow, enclosed activity, as if a separate
metabolic process were taking place beneath their surface. In the light boxes, photographs of an
abandoned Soviet-era holiday resort in the Dnipropetrovsk region (Ukraine) deepen this
attention to slow processes of transformation: A place that once served to regulate peace and relaxation now appears as a stage for gradual change, as the
architecture is gradually rewritten by plants, moisture, and time. Thus,
the light boxes appear less like monuments than like viewing devices that make visible how wood swells, facades darken, and leisure infrastructure becomes a vehicle for other interconnections.

While the exhibition generally explores how places of human existence transition into other ecologies, it is simultaneously shaped by the conditions in Ukraine, where landscapes bear multifaceted histories of imperialism, exploitation, industrialization, forced migration, nuclear catastrophe, and ongoing war. It becomes clear that questions of the Anthropocene must be situated and not negotiated as a universal narrative. As the author and researcher Asia Bazdyrieva argues, an unreflectively adopted Anthropocene narrative smooths over historical layers and obscures the fact that land and people in Ukraine have long been treated as an operational resource rather than as historical subjects. Exclusion zones and industrial areas, as well as cities and villages emptied by occupation or economic collapse, bear these traces. In this context, scholars like Adrian Ivakhiv make it clear that ecological futures and resistance to imperial aggression in Ukraine cannot be separated, but are two sides of the same struggle for a habitable world.