Liquid Borders, Shifting Grounds – Where Water Remembers

Artist Talk

Filmstill "So Close You Almost Can Touch It" (2025) des Künstlerduos Variable Name/Назва змінна – Filmstill "So Close You Almost Can Touch It" (2025) des Künstlerduos Variable Name/Назва змінна

This artist talk explores how water, infrastructure, and landscape function as carriers of memory, loss, and political violence. Taking water as both a methodological and perceptual framework, Valerie Karpan’s artistic practice engages with infrastructural modulation, transmission, and relationality as ways of sensing and narrating space. Through moving image, sound, and embodied modes of perception, the talk considers how environmental transformations – such as flooding, dam construction, and forced displacement – are inscribed in bodies, narratives, and everyday experience.

The programme includes a screening of So Close You Can Almost Touch It (2025) by the artistic duo Variable Name/Назва змінна, which reflects on loss and adaptation in environments shaped by hydrological intervention and war-related destruction, proposing speculative forms of collective memory and imagination. In dialogue with this work, Hydraulic Border Intervals (2026), an ongoing sound-based research project, approaches borders as modulated zones shaped by rivers, radio waves, and administrative regimes. Kinography (2021), a collective digital mapping project, traces modernist cinemas built within the Soviet film distribution system and their local adaptations in Ukraine. As part of a broader trajectory of counter-mapping practices, it foregrounds embodied interaction, material engagement, and collective processes.

The discussion opens up questions of how landscapes shape subjectivity, and how artistic practices can reconfigure modes of sensing, contact, and remembrance within fragile environments.

Participants

Valerie Karpan

Valerie Karpan is an artist-researcher from Kyiv and PhD candidate in Contemporary Arts (University of Coimbra) whose practice intersects participatory art, critical heritage studies, and environmental-infrastructural approaches to memory in Central and Eastern Europe, exploring landscapes and borders as sites of loss, transmission, and political subjectification. She collaborates with the Invisible University for Ukraine (CEU), is a co-founder of Cultural Geographies, and a member of the artistic collective Variable Name/Назва змінна. She is currently a Research Fellow at the Centre for Advanced Study inherit. heritage in transformation, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

Elisaveta Ernst

Elisaveta Ernst is an art and image historian specialising in the history and theory of photography. Her research focuses on the epistemology and aesthetics of image-based knowledge production in art and science. Her broader research fields include the aesthetics of totalitarianism; art history of Eastern Europe; gender/queer, postcolonial, and postsecular theory; and visual activism. She currently works as a postdoctoral research associate and research coordinator at the Centre for Advanced Studies inherit. heritage in transformation at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Previously, she held a position as a research associate at the Chair of Art History of Eastern Europe at the Institute for Art and Visual History, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

- Price: free admission, ticket required

- Duration: 120 min

- Language: English

- Location: Humboldt Lab, 1st Floor

- belongs to: On Water

Next date:

• Date Thursday, 25/June/2026 18:00
• Venue Humboldt Forum: Humboldt Labor, 1. OG
• Address Schloßplatz, 10178 Berlin-Mitte