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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. Of the first edition of two, one was left in a public toilet in Oslo, while the other entered the collection of S.M.A.K. Later versions were shown at the Kortrijk Triennial and at Museum M in Leuven. The choice of soap was deliberate: it refers to care, to attempts at washing something away, but also to what inevitably disappears. Pasaiko offers no solution here, but she does provide a way of approaching pain and absurdity.

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. What at first seems a minor intervention has major consequences. By taking away the shadow, she also removes the threatening element that gave the painting its charged atmosphere. In doing so, Pasaiko questions whether the sense of mystery really lies within the image itself, or whether it is something we as viewers project onto it. She subtly undermines the authority of the original and raises broader questions about authorship, interpretation and the canon of art history.

Last year, in the Japanese city of Kanazawa, Pasaiko presented My Father As A Fax. The work shows a chair draped with a long printed fax: a letter to a father figure who is never addressed directly. By laying the fax across the chair, the text is given a body. The father’s absence becomes tangible through the words that gather around him. The work shows how Pasaiko, with care and indirection, manages to approach what is difficult to name. The letter is not a direct confrontation, but an attempt at closeness, written in a form that is both evasive and honest.

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.

For this edition of the Billboard Series, Oksana Pasaiko presents new work whose title recalls the postcard series mentioned earlier. The billboard shows a photo of a wall on which she wrote the words ‘the whole world – without me = the whole world’. It is a dry observation, almost casually phrased, and yet it immediately raises questions. Is it an act of self-effacement, or a way of seeking to be remembered? Its strength lies precisely in this ambiguity. She seems to erase herself, but does so through a clear mark of presence. By writing the words on the wall, she leaves her trace on the world she insists will continue perfectly well without her.

The wall is not empty; Pasaiko’s words appear among other signs. Traces of graffiti are visible, scribbles and names whose authors remain unknown. They are part of the urban layer in which Pasaiko inscribes herself. All are attempts to leave something behind in an environment that constantly changes. From prehistoric cave drawings to contemporary tags, the gesture remains the same: not to write history, but to assert presence, to be seen, perhaps simply not to be forgotten.

Seen from a distance, the work looks almost documentary: an ordinary city wall, perhaps even the wall of 019 itself. But up close, the photo reveals itself as a field of printed dots, a raster of tiny spots of colour. It is a classic printing technique, but here it strengthens the idea that this sentence – like its maker – is only temporarily visible. What first seems solid and graspable becomes elusive, as if the material world falters and the image dissolves before our eyes.

Oksana Pasaiko often worked with what escapes the eye, with what is absent yet still palpable. This gesture, too, is small, precise and charged. In the light of her recent death, it is inevitably read as a final message, even if it does not aim to be one. It resists sentimentality and leaves space for interpretation – exactly as Pasaiko always did.

All images courtesy of the artist
Text: Marie Cathérine Stalpaert
Installation photography: Michiel De Cleene

Billboard Series is a long-term art project in public space, for which every three months an artist is invited to create a new, site-specific work for a 50 m2 billboard on Dok Noord, Ghent. Through changing presentations, Billboard Series wants to build a sustainable and productive dialogue with the surrounding neighbourhood and urban landscape, reflect on the changes that this neighbourhood is currently undergoing, and introduce a broad audience to different visual languages and ways of looking at the world. For each Billboard Series, we create a small publication that we distribute for free in the neighborhood. Students from the Postgraduate Program in Curatorial Studies at KASK, Ghent, write the accompanying text.

Billboard Series is a project of artlead, together with 019. Billboard Series is curated by Thomas Caron, takes place within a scenography by architect Olivier Goethals, and is being developed with the support of the City of Ghent.