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# La Clairvoyance
- URL: https://arts-of-the-working-class.ghost.io/text/la-clairvoyance/
- Published: 2026-09-08T13:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-13T13:50:09.000Z
- Description: On the work of Katja Pilipenko.
- Author: María Inés Plaza Lazo
- Tags: Art, Portrait

Behind a semi-transparent surface, powered by exposed cables and USB chargers, 23 smartphones emit a restless glow. The screens flicker with content stripped of narrative importance, reduced to movement, light, and repetition. What the Moscow-born artist Katja Pilipenko stages here is a contemporary form of clairvoyance without vision: *Media Curtain* (2025) assembles plexiglass, perforated aluminum, and circulating images into a membrane of controlled visibility, where everything is exposed, and nothing is fully legible. Subjects are rendered permanently available to extraction, while the infrastructures that govern them remain opaque. Seeing becomes compulsory; understanding references becomes optional.

Because surveillance has become normalized, Pilipenko aestheticizes its surface in a melancholic gesture. This melancholy is a structural one, no abstract form: a quiet unveiling of promises that no longer hold. The logic extends into *Not Everyone Will Be Taken to a Bunker* (2024), where clairvoyance takes architectural form. Installed within a Nazi-era bunker in Hamburg, the work confronts security as a historical and ideological technology. An open, expansive, negatively rendered projection of the Negev desert collides with the bunker’s enclosed interior. Mirrors extend the image into false infinity, while sound amplifies the contradiction between freedom and militarized safety. Here, protection reveals itself as selective foresight, guaranteeing survival for some while forecasting abandonment for others.

![](https://artsoftheworkingclass.org/assets/Screenshot-2026-09-08-at-16__ResizedImageWzYwMCwzNDBd.30.52.png)

Katja Pilipenko, *Not Everyone Will Be Taken To a Bunker*, 2024\. Installation view, Hajusom e.V., Bunker on Feldstrasse, Hamburg.

If architecture conditions bodies, language conditions consent. *InSearch of Lost Security* (2022), Pilipenko makes this mechanism tangible through six aluminum plates carrying uninterrupted textual flows from Russian Channel One and Tagesschau in the days preceding the invasion of Ukraine. Hung on thin rods, the plates sway as viewers pass between them, producing bodily instability. Pilipenko withholds authorial judgment, reconstructing instead the informational environment of late capitalism, where competing state narratives converge on the same abstraction: “security.” Clairvoyance here is a bureaucratic preview of a catastrophe in slow motion; the velocity at which we read the information in front of us.

Ideology, then, is rehearsed as some sort of rhythm, repetition, until its affective exhaustion. In *Arguments* (2021), this latent violence condenses into sculptural form. Glass replicas of police batons—literally translated into “arguments” in colloquial Russian—expose how coercion masquerades as dialogue. Fragility confronts force, revealing that authoritarian communication always carries the threat of impact beneath its rational surface.

![](https://artsoftheworkingclass.org/assets/In-Search-of-Lost-Security_2022__ResizedImageWzYwMCw0MDBd.jpg)

Katia Pilipenko, *In Search of Lost Security,* 2022\. © Katia Pilipenko.

*Buffet 58* (2025) turns finally to ritual as a technology of belief. A Soviet-style table—food, champagne, conviviality—activates nostalgia as collective affect. The engraving of “58,” referencing Stalin’s penal code for anti-revolutionary crimes, silently and consistently interrupts the celebration. Melancholia appears again, this time as labor: an affective economy through which authoritarianism reproduces itself by aestheticizing historical violence and converting trauma into comfort. This is where we find a thread in Pilipenko’s evolving practice, namely through the staging of belief as a material condition—something enacted, rehearsed, and shared collectively. There is no privacy.

This assertion reaches a decisive articulation in *Do You Believe in Vanga?* (2026). Rooted in her research into the figure of Baba Vanga (Vangeliya Pandeva Gushterova, 1911–1996), the project traces how mysticism, media, science, and the state converged to manufacture a national myth. Pilipenko approaches Vanga not as a singular prophetic voice, but as a dispersed apparatus of narration: her words surviving only as fragments, while concrete “predictions” are authored, archived, broadcast, and monetized by others. To return to a time when clairvoyants like Vanga held social, spiritual, and state authority is to recognize that post-truth is not a rupture, but a governing condition. 

**//**