Consent to a Fairy Tale | solo exhibition |

2025

"Every fairy tale arises from the depths of blood and fear. […] Its outer shell may differ […], but its core—the depth of longing—remains the same."

— Franz Kafka

We enter this space as though we already know the rules of the fairy tale, but not the tale itself. A tale in which care is inseparable from power, and what is considered "right" cannot be separated from unquestioning acceptance. A tale that we both accept and refuse to take at face value, yet continue to hear day after day—for amusement, survival, or simply to understand how the world is meant to work. Children listen in order to fall asleep; adults tell stories in search of silence.

Yet the exhibition before us offers no obvious narrative. It smells of iodine, old furniture, sterile cotton wool, and metal. Footsteps are clearly audible, but it is impossible to tell whether we are following them or hiding from them. Voices emerge and disappear without ever becoming speech; they remain rustling sounds, echoes, traces of another's presence. Within this space, we become witnesses: those who remain and look.

Olga Makhno's works reveal the rigid structures of everyday life. There are no miracles here, only repetition, order, and punishment. These structures of the everyday fairy tale* are immediately recognizable: we live within them, absorb their logic, and surrender to their rhythm. Familiar objects appear transformed, their forms subtly distorted as though reflected in a crooked mirror—or, conversely, stripped of everything superfluous so that they confront us in their bare essence.

The narrative branches outward from the installation Voices. Words become entangled until they no longer sound like language but resemble a snowstorm—the long hum of winter, where every sound rebounds from countless white surfaces and multiplies endlessly. Within this dispersed landscape, we become ready to join the snowfall itself, accepting compassion as a shared act of endurance.

It is impossible to dismiss the almost physical sensation of pain evoked by the documentation of the performance In the Corner on Buckwheat. Yet it is equally impossible to deny that, in feeling compassion, we inevitably separate ourselves both from the one who suffers and from the one who inflicted that suffering. This distance narrows almost to the point of disappearance in Glass Sphere, a work that has quite literally entered beneath the skin of the building, altering the colour of its walls.

The artist seems to inhabit a dream from which there is no awakening. There is only a path and a choice: to keep looking without turning away, to continue forward while sharing the weight of what has been seen, or to reject it altogether. As in a fairy tale, the road is long, the forest dark, and there may be more than one life. Reaching the ending matters less than not losing one another along the way.

Because no one should have to endure this alone.

Alexandra Pavlovskaya
Curator

* An everyday fairy tale is a folk tale rooted in the ordinary lives of common people rather than in miracles or fantastical beings.