Cauchemar

Clausen, S. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6536-6236 and Kerestey, P. (2026) Cauchemar. In: Cauchemar. Oncurating.org. ISBN 9781912115679 (In Press)

Abstract/Summary

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 between different media and shifts in tone, foregrounding mediation itself as a central concern. The introductory 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 reflects on the structure and atmosphere of this exchange, attending to hesitation, interruption, imbalance, and the violence embedded in the dialogue. The focus lies on how positions are asserted and deflected, and on how a debate staged as dialogue reveals deeper fractures within European political discourse. The interview is approached as a symptomatic document that exposes the difficulty of speaking across radically different lived realities. The publication then presents a documentary rendering of two re-staged performances 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 introducing a visible layer of displacement. Film stills are interwoven with selected excerpts, leading to the complete English translation of the interview. Read in full, the transcript allows duration and repetition to take effect, making perceptible the emotional strain embedded in the exchange and the uneasy gap between voice and body. Installation views from the exhibition at Voloshyn Gallery in Miami follow. They show how the filmed re-enactment was situated within the gallery space, where projected text and the physical presence of the puppets extend the interview into a spatial setting. Language shifts from broadcast to staged performance, and then into exhibition. A short text introduces the final section of ink drawings derived from archival photographs, family images, and circulated media fragments. These works do not reproduce their sources directly. Instead, they rework them through erasure and distortion, functioning as visual counterparts to the interview and holding unresolved tension. Across its components, Cauchemar operates as archive and intervention, asking how speech and image might register historical rupture without resolving it.