Exhibition following an artist residency program in Vladivostok, Russia. During my stay there in 2018, the city of Vladivostok was in the process of removing and demolishing many Soviet-era murals and sculptures. I found myself preoccupied with the question: as a tourist, was I even allowed to find these artworks from another time beautiful — independent of their political reading? Or was that impossible altogether? I made plaster casts and molds of fragments of the sculptures and used them as collage elements in my own work.

(Verena Issel, 2019)