Nikolay Karabinovych

What has happened to the protagonist of Nikolay Karabinovych’s installation remains a mystery. The work depicts a detective agency that has been sealed off and abandoned mid-investigation. Evidence of crimes preferred to be forgotten—made up of dusty objects from the corners of former empires—covers the walls and tables, mapping missteps and failures in the so-called transition from socialism to capitalism. It includes signs of a coming catastrophe that we should have noticed earlier.

Ghosts from this era appear as part of the investigation. Russian journalist Vladislav Listyev, murdered in 1995, has a cameo, looking like Walter Benjamin in a famous photo. Turbo-folk icon Ceca, the widow of Serbian warlord Arkan, appears as an emblem of flawed impunity following her husband’s murder and her arrest. Her story links directly to Južni Vetar (Southern Wind), the legendary folk outfit whose synthesized, Eastern-inflected beats paved the way for turbo-folk as the soundtrack of 1990s gangster capitalism, nationalism, and war. In a hallway torture chamber, this music blares on repeat, while a takeaway zine compiles the detective’s strange case files.

Nikolay Karabinovych (1988, Odesa, Ukraine) is an artist who works across moving image, sound, installation, and performance. Departing from the cultural debris of the Eastern Bloc and current regimes of control, he creates multilayered spaces where trauma and comedy coexist, tracking how memory, identity, and power are produced and reassembled. His works have been exhibited at institutions such as Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; M HKA, Antwerp; MAXXI, Rome; Albertinum – Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden; Jewish Museum of Belgium, Brussels; and Bozar, Brussels. Karabinovych has been awarded the PinchukArtCentre Prize multiple times. He lives in Amsterdam.