Irina Lotarevich

Irina Lotarevich’s sculptural practice is characterized by the intersection of her own subjective experience with larger systems. She works with wood, metal, and casting techniques, often combining both high-grade and low-grade or devalued materials with sophisticated fabrication techniques and a sensitivity to building spatial narratives. Lotarevich also weaves her own writing and use of language into her work. The minimal yet complex and specific forms of her sculptures reference architecture, bureaucracy, labor, and parts of her body.

The series Housing Anxiety, to which the artist has added the large new work Housing Anxiety 6 (2022) especially for the exhibition Systems of Belief, was made last year in the middle of the pandemic. As the series title already suggests, these works reflect fears associated with living and accommodation, particularly in the light of the increasingly precarious housing market. Lotarevich’s objects made of aluminum and door locks are formally based on the floor plans of houses and apartments with variously sized rooms. Locks are inserted into the surfaces in a strict arrangement next to and under each other, thereby creating a grid pattern. At the margins of these objects there are further locks, but now with keys in them. At the upper edge of each work there is a handle, so that these objects also resemble drawers. In their strict arrangements and logic, these works — presented flat up against the wall — also bear similarities to the structures of hard drives and servers. Looked at in analogue form, these locks and keys actually open up virtual data, pathways, and spaces. 

Housing Anxiety 6 (2022) is the largest work in the series so far, with the dimensions of a 65-inch flat-screen monitor. This formal decision enables the artist to reinforce the symbolic dimensions of this work, which can all the more be read as a kind of analogue representation of the digital world. It thus treats two levels of access: to resources and to information systems. By here contrasting these two spheres, the artist shows that we are dependent on both analogue and digital resources, and that access to these is becoming ever more important in our daily lives. This work traces the connections between the two realms and explores how they each penetrate the other in relation to mechanisms of social distribution, technical networks, and a retreat into individual fears within the social system.

Housing Anxiety 6, 2022
Aluminum, locks, keys, stainless steel screws
96,8 × 150,3 × 7 cm
Courtesy the artist