2025
Mixed media installation
Steel, recycled bar, wheeled carts, Dyneema cord
Dimensions: 600 × 40 cm (variable)
Fiberglass, epoxy resin, automotive paint, aluminium
Dimensions: 55 × 55 cm
Steel, motor, Raspberry Pi, electronics, stainless steel, Ukrainian bronze, lead

Dimensions: 220 × 40 × 10 cm

Project reflects on the fragile thresholds between order and collapse, drawn from an ongoing exchange between an artist and a scientist. Shaped by the artist’s background in Ukraine—where war has reshaped the sounds, systems, and meanings of daily life—it asks what holds us together, and at what cost.
Power, here, is not only electrical or political, but also measured in human and animal terms: muscle, endurance, sacrifice. The horse becomes a charged metaphor for labour and resilience, carrying the weight of history forward—staged inside a former military horse stable, where absence resonates in the architecture. It stands for the tension between progress and exhaustion, between the forces we harness and those that ultimately break us.
At the heart of the exhibition is a kinetic sculpture: a machine of falling weights and violent sound. Its relentless motion evokes not only horsepower and mechanical energy, but the strained infrastructures that govern survival. In a quieter adjoining room, a year-long correspondence with a scientist unfolds—letters reflecting on power, collapse, and responsibility, exchanged across disciplines and distance.
A key element of the installation is a bronze cast of a horse’s leg—based on a model from the Rijksakademie collection, once acquired as one of the most significant anatomical images for artists to study. A new copy was cast in Ukraine, near the front line, where the value and use of raw materials like bronze are directly shaped by extraction, war economies, and shifting lines of power.
The title references James Watt’s invention of the term "horsepower"—a metric designed to translate the strength of animals into industrial output. Today, that measure returns with urgency in Ukraine, where a fragile electric grid—repeatedly targeted by Russian forces—is held together by a patchwork of human effort, generators, batteries, and improvised systems. Energy flows, fails, and reconfigures.
Through sound, movement, and language, the work becomes a meditation on systems under pressure—how we define power, what it costs to carry it, and what remains when it fails.