Lesia Vasylchenko: Chronosphere

Kunsthall Oslo is very pleased to present Chronosphere, Lesia Vasylchenko’s first solo exhibition in Oslo.

Chronosphere is a parafictional story about the weaponization of time, from the picosecond synchronization of Earth observation satellites to the deep time of ecological trauma. The story of modernity is often presented as the story of the conquest of distance, from the first railways, to supersonic flight, to the colonization of low Earth orbit. The present moment—the idea of the present moment—is the culmination of this process in a technologically-produced simultaneity.

Just as our idea of here and now integrates events tens of thousands of kilometers away with events at our fingertips, it also integrates timescales from microseconds to millions of years. The temporalities that structure our imagination and experience are increasingly produced by technologies and systems whose ultimate shape and purpose are hidden from us.

The central work in the exhibition is a newly commissioned video that seeks to visualize our position in the chronosphere, this ever-changing cloud of past events and future probabilities that swirls around us at every passing moment. Vasylchenko’s own location filming is combined with CGI, found footage and AI-generated video to compose the testimony of a witness before an imagined future court of time. The past, the present and the future, in different but interconnected ways, become both the site and subject of conflict and resistance.

As part of the Chronosphere project Vasylchenko has programmed a series of public events featuring artists and critics whose practice touches on related questions, with presentations from Aleksei Borisionok, Bahar Noorizadeh, Riar Rizaldi, Jassem Hindi, Nikhil Vettukattil and Sara Eliassen. Please see kunsthalloslo.no for full information, dates and times. We are very grateful to the Fritt Ord Foundation for supporting this programme and to KHiO, UKS and Cinemateket for co-hosting.

Lesia Vasylchenko (b. 1990, Ukraine, based in Oslo, Norway) is an artist working with installation, moving image and photography. She is a curator at the artist-run gallery Podium (Oslo) and the founder of STRUKTURA.Time, an initiative for research and practice in the area between visual art, media archaeology, literature and philosophy. Vasylchenko’s artworks have been shown at the Munch Triennale, Oslo; Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin; Haugar Art Museum, Tønsberg; Tenthaus Gallery, Oslo and The Wrong New Digital Art Biennale among many other places. Vasylchenko was shortlisted for the Sparebankstiftelsen DNB Art Prize 2022, and is the recipient of the Sandefjord Kunstforening Art Prize for 2023. Her work is part of the collection of the KIASMA Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki. Vasylchenko holds a degree in journalism from the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kiev and a Masters degree from the Oslo National Academy of Arts, where she graduated in 2022.

Kunsthall Oslo is a non-profit art space presenting a programme of international contemporary art with an emphasis on new commissions, and a parallel commitment to exploring the social and historical context of art production. Kunsthall Oslo is funded by the Norwegian Ministry of Culture and by the City of Oslo. The Chronosphere exhibition has been supported by Arts Council Norway.