Proxies

Voloshyn Gallery is pleased to present Proxies, a new exhibition by Szuper Gallery, the long-term collaboration between artists Susanne Clausen (Germany/UK) and Pavlo Kerestey (Ukraine/Germany). The exhibition will be on view from September 25th to October 25th at the gallery's Miami location.

Proxies is a collaborative project by artists Susanne Clausen and Pavlo Kerestey, exploring how displacement, memory, and representation are negotiated through performance, drawing, and painting. Developed through international residencies and rooted in personal and political experience, the project brings together distinct visual elements to stage a fragmented but resonant inquiry into how we witness and process war from different positions.

At the center of the exhibition is a two-screen video installation that re-enacts a recorded radio conversation between a Ukrainian writer and a German interviewer captured during the early stages of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Rather than dramatizing the exchange, the artists restage it using hand-crafted puppets, fragmented doubles that resemble the artists but also stand in for others caught in unequal or difficult dialogues. These figures perform to the original audio, inhabiting a space between self-portrait and symbolic surrogate. One screen plays the subtitled dialogue, while the other presents the filmed puppet performance in a sparse, studio-like setting. The result is a layered encounter between voice, image, and gesture that explores misalignment, fatigue, and the ethics of mediated discourse.

The puppets act as “proxies” - stand-ins for personal and political positions that may be difficult to inhabit directly. This idea extends into Clausen’s series of drawings, which are made using a range of materials including ink, pencil, and wash. These works draw from a variety of sources, archival photographs, personal and family images, and digital fragments circulating on social media since 2022. Some images are drawn directly from moments of visibility during the war, others are more ambiguous, imagined, or mediated. Rather than reproducing their sources, the drawings intervene through layering, omission, or distortion, creating visual proxies that register both presence and absence. They hover between fact and fiction, acting as sites of memory, dislocation, and reflective resistance.

Kerestey’s paintings contribute a spatial and emotional framework for the installation. Drawing on imagined memories of his hometown in Ukraine, the works blend recollection with the visual language of broadcast interiors. These painted environments are not literal depictions, but composite spaces that suggest both domestic familiarity and public stagecraft. Their flat perspectives and constructed viewpoints invite viewers into a psychological terrain shaped by displacement, performance, and political tension.

Proxies invites reflection on how we speak about war and crisis, and from where. It avoids definitive statements in favor of subtle, unsettling exchanges between bodies, voices, and representations. The installation suggests that witnessing is always partial, always shaped by position, translation, and form.

About the artists
Susanne Clausen is a German-born artist, curator, and professor based in the UK. Her work spans performance, video, installation, and collaborative practice. She is Professor of Fine Art at the University of Reading and Director of Reading International, a curatorial platform for international contemporary art and research-led practice.

Pavlo Kerestey is a Ukrainian-born painter and media artist whose work explores cultural memory, shifting identities, and everyday experiences of transition. A founding member of the Ukrainian New Wave, his practice includes expressive figurative painting, installation, and collaborative performance. His recent work draws on personal histories shaped by a Soviet-era upbringing and transnational experiences, reflecting on how images and memories evolve across time and place. Working with a layered visual language that blends loose figuration, atmospheric fields, and constructed spatial framing, his paintings suggest open-ended narratives that move between the personal and the collective.

About Szuper Gallery
Szuper Gallery is the collaborative platform of Clausen and Kerestey, founded in Munich in the late 1990s. Originally conceived as a performative gallery, the project has evolved into a sustained, interdisciplinary practice grounded in critical engagement with social and political realities. Szuper Gallery’s work has been exhibited internationally, including at ICA, London; Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; Western Front, Vancouver; Kunsthalle, Helsinki; Shedhalle, Zürich; Ludwig Museum, Budapest; and the National Art Museum of Ukraine, Kyiv.