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ISBN 9798252318011

Cauchemar is a collaborative publication by Susanne Clausen and Pavlo Kerestey, developed within their joint practice as Szuper Gallery. Structured as both documentation and reflection, the book moves across media and registers, foregrounding mediation itself as a central concern.

The opening text centres on the radio interview that forms the conceptual core of the project: a public conversation between a Ukrainian writer and a German journalist. It attends to the structure and atmosphere of this exchange, focusing on hesitation, interruption, imbalance, and the violence embedded within the dialogue. The conversation reveals a persistent asymmetry, in which the urgency of lived experience is met with distancing, abstraction, or redirection, pointing to broader fractures within European political discourse.

The interview is restaged through a dual-screen video in which handmade puppets, modelled as distorted doubles of the artists, stand in for the original speakers. These figures act as proxies, carrying the recorded voices while making visible a condition of displacement. The gap between voice and body becomes central. Film stills and excerpts lead into a complete English translation of the interview, where duration and repetition allow the strain of the exchange to register.

Presented within an installation at Voloshyn Gallery in Miami, the work extends into space. Text, moving image, and sculptural elements intersect, shifting the interview from broadcast to performance to installation. The work stages its material without resolving it.

Alongside this, drawings by Susanne Clausen and a series of paintings by Pavlo Kerestey rework archival photographs, family images, and circulated media fragments. Through erasure, distortion, and repetition, these works extend the tensions of the interview, keeping memory, history, and representation open and unsettled.

Editor: Susanne Clausen
Design: Matthew Walkerdine

Published by Reading International / OnCurating.org, April 2026