Oksana Pasaiko
1982-2025, Ruthenia
Oksana Pasaiko was an artist from Ruthenia, a historical region somewhere between today’s Poland, Slovakia, Ukraine and Romania. Where she came from exactly was never certain, and that’s no coincidence. Pasaiko deliberately chose to keep her background unclear. She wanted to separate her work from her biography, as if her own story mattered less than what she made.
A key part of her practice is the long-running publication the whole world – without me = the whole world, a series of postcards she developed with Roma Publications since 2004. Each card shows one of her works. Together they form a concentrated insight into her way of thinking and making. Her works are rarely straightforward, and it is exactly that openness that makes them invite repeated viewing.
One card shows Short Sad Text (based on the borders of 14 countries). This work consists of a piece of soap in which Pasaiko marked existing borders with human hair – borders not shaped by rivers or mountains, but by historical and political conflicts. Another postcard shows her work Correction (Mistero e malinconia di una strada, Giorgio de Chirico, 1914). This is a digital reworking of the famous painting by the Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico. In Pasaiko’s version, the mysterious shadow behind the building has been removed.
Oksana Pasaiko - Short Sad Text (based on the border of two countries), 2024
Oksana Pasaiko - Black Square on Postcard
Oksana Pasaiko at Manifest 5 in San Sebastian, 2004
Oksana Pasaiko - Correction (Mistero e malinconia di una strada, Giorgio de Chirico, 1914)
Oksana Pasaiko - My Father As A Fax, 2024 installation view at Yonkai, Kanazawa
At first glance, Pasaiko’s oeuvre seems modest, but it unfolds as a carefully built form of poetry. Again and again, one theme returns: disappearance, absence, elusiveness. These are subtle strategies to give shape to what cannot be seen. What is missing becomes the space for imagination. Each time, she created her own reality through language, image and form, with an almost weightless precision.
Oksana Pasaiko showed her work at Manifesta 5, Donostia; Yonkai, Kanazawa; Museum M, Leuven; July August September, Cologne; VW, Berlin; Misako & Rosen, Tokyo; and the Kortrijk Triannale.
We cannot direct you to other websites on Pasaiko’s work, as there is very little info to be found online.
