Installation: fabrics, texts, drawings and photographs

Portheads and Riverbeds at Ausstellungsraum klingental Basel, Switzerland

A journey begins in Gothenburg, passes through Malmö, and arrives in Basel. It sounds like a straight line, almost inevitable, but it isn’t. Water never moves in a straight line.

The installation unfolds across fabrics, drawings, and photographs arranged on the walls and hanging from the ceiling. Text is written directly onto the material, tracing a surreal story told through the eyes of two animals: a cat and a rat. Once enemies, they are brought together by circumstance, learning to move and survive side by side, through cracks, above and below, across lands, waters, and harbours. The cat sees what moves just above the surface. The rat hears what vibrates from far below. Together they become a measuring instrument for the state of the ground and its problems.
Beneath this fable runs an anatomy of the contemporary city: its underground infrastructure of cables, tunnels, and server rooms; its saturated and poisoned soils; the layers sealed under asphalt, like a bandage rarely changed. The ground, as Lukianska writes, is a body cut open, filled up, then closed up. It nourishes and bleeds.
Basel, a port city at the intersection of industrial waterways and ecological precarity, holds all of this at once. Lukianska’s work traces the invisible lines running between these systems – economic, ecological, political- through a poetics of survival: not calm, not resolved, but listening.
Giulia Busetti

Many thanks to
IASPIS for support Ausstellungsraum Klingental for showing us
Cora Piantoni Giulia Busetti, Gabriel N. Gee for curating this exhibition
All involved artists for great talks and works
Eva-Maria Junker for words and thoughts