Hans Ostapenko

When Hans Ostapenko began his artist residency in the Atelierhaus Salzamt in Linz (AT), even though the Stadium of the Linz Athletic Sports Club (LASK) was already demolished, a few months would pass until the official groundbreaking for the rebuild. This moment of upheaval is captured in the video „Especially”: round pillars reach up from the dilapidated ground to the sky like antique columns, the green grass yielded to barren fallow on which only a few pioneer plants burgeon.

The supposed documentary is interrupted by an intervention of a construction worker, pushing a piece of double-bar-matting fence, bent in a circle, down a ditch, subsequently rolling around like a solitary piece of tumbleweed through the desert. Suddenly, the curious object is stuck on a piece of mangled railings. A surveillance camera in the back as a silent witness. Further convoluted pieces of fence appear: abstract shapes that seem reminiscent of ASCII-code and appear like a secret language, breaking through the strict order of the grid and contrast the clutter around the scenery.

The shop window in the neighbourhood of the Wohnzimmer Cafebar evokes a similar image: the rectangular screen inside the rectangular window is surrounded by frantically sprayed graffiti. Here, various interferences to occupy or redesignate the public space collide. Moreover, the double-bar-matting fence as well as the shop window are ambivalent symbols for the protection of the indoors and the lockout of the outdoors, both imprint themselves into the surroundings like three-dimensional lines and, thorugh their transparency, allow a view onto what is behind. The whole scenery oscillates between the shaped and the amorphous, order and chaos, structure and disorder.

Hans Ostapenko (*1982 in Odesa, UKR, lives and works in Dortmund) took up his artistic work, which lies between sculpture and sketch, performance and art in public space, in 2017. He thereby explores the relationship between public, semi-public and private space, the development of borders and territory as well as symbolical methods of conquering them. The perception of the social, economical, political and also juridical dimensions within this complex is something that Ostapenko engages with, as an Ukrainian as well as an artist.

Text: Linda Schröer
Translation: Matthias Fabry
Photo: Joshua Hoven