Text: Clarisse Gome
29/11/2023

The installations by artist Ksenia Lanikina offer a unique sensory experience, combining natural light, sound, and scents. Her works are not always easy to comprehend or describe, as they engage all the senses. Primarily, Ksenia Lanikina invites the audience to undergo a sensual experience. Thus, the artist creates an elegant and refined aesthetic that appeals to a diverse audience.

Fascinated by themes of perception, nature, and technology, Ksenia Lanikina presented her latest work at the Outline music festival in Moscow. The Outline festival, held for several years, attracts young artists willing to showcase their works in challenging spaces such as former factories and hangars.

Ksenia Lanikina can be described as a universal artist, sculptor and musician, working with light and space. Using sounds and scents as expressive tools, the artist creates spaces specially to experience. This original artistic approach is directed not only towards our visual senses but also our overall sensation. Initiating experiments with perception and creating immersive environments resulted from Ksenia Lanikina's research connecting internal and external spaces.

The artwork "Light Bath" by Ksenia Lanikina is an installation featuring a round opening in the ceiling facing the sky. These installations can be standalone structures or integrated into existing architecture. These openings offer a new way of perception. Similar to the soft surface of the space where the viewer is placed, invoking various associations from a cradle and maternal womb to floating in the clouds, Ksenia also utilizes scents and sounds for complete immersion. In these works, the fusion of light, scents, materials, and sounds creates intriguing perceptual effects complemented by openings made in the sky, giving these spaces a surreal appearance.

"The nature of my work is the shaping of an environment. Space is a material, perception, a means, as it reminds us of another place we already know. In my works, there is no representation," - Ksenia Lanikina.

Perception lies at the heart of the experience of these works, aiming to make us feel something entirely new, giving substance and form to these spaces. Time, also acting as a participant in this perceptual environment, shapes variations of these spaces.

By continuing to work with light, Ksenia will present a collection of her works in the future Light Museum, opening at VDNH. The artist's work invites the viewer to immerse themselves in the core of intangible and sensory creativity of contemporary art. Ksenia Lanikina does this to create a perceptual environment in the room, destabilizing the viewer's senses and laying new experiments of art.

Her work at the PERMM Museum in the exhibition "Scents. Sounds. Factories." also search for this destabilization of the viewers' senses: "Artwork is also a kind of experience that arises between you and the space," she explains. An art object is not so much an object in the sense of something you can hold in your hands, as it is the conditions that allow you to create a special encounter between you and the space." - Ksenia Lanikina.

Indeed, the specificity of this artist's work lies in engaging environment, technology, time, and effort to create nothing else but the conditions for an unprecedented experience. In her works, there is essentially nothing to possess; there is only a situation to be lived through, and its abundance aligns with our expectations in an art world that produces numerous objects and unforgettable experiences – physical or aesthetic.