Lesia Topolnyk: Thresholds of Ideologies

In Man and His Symbols, Carl Jung describes the threshold between consciousness and the unconscious as a liminal space where forgotten symbols, repressed truths, and unspoken desires rise to the surface. It is here, at this fragile boundary, that transformation becomes possible.

Thresholds of Ideologies weaves the physical world and real geographies with the mental landscapes of perception and imagination. Growing up in Ukraine and exploring sites across the globe—including New York, Morocco, and Ghana—Lesia Topolnyk observed how differently we perceive and interpret the world. The exhibition is a quest to understand how humans construct meaning in relation to their inner worlds and how, despite inhabiting separate realities, we might find common ground.

The exhibition unfolds as a cinematic space, a journey through shifting spatial and ideological boundaries. Mirrors, portals, and reflective surfaces accompanied by immersive video and audio evoke self-confrontation and liminality, while misplaced and nonfunctional objects express the tension between progress and collapse, belief and doubt. Scenes resemble a film with absent actors—abandoned objects, empty chairs, traces of gestures once performed—yet the visitor ultimately becomes the actor. A lingering question emerges: if you are a dreamer within a dream, who is truly dreaming?

From the brightly lit entrance, inspired by the largest concentrated solar plant in Morocco, to darker interior rooms and hidden spaces—such as forgotten chimney doors uncovered within the building—the journey guides visitors through shifting scales of perception. A rediscovered chimney door opens onto an excavated inner landscape, where countless door keys evoke Manhattan’s layered histories of capitalism and property, while another reveals the underground world of a mining village in Ukraine, inviting reflection on how these distant histories, economies, and environments converge and shape our understanding of global interconnections.

In the exhibition, these stories are interwoven with local ones through Viennese building fragments from the archive of materialnomaden. They bear the imprint of different epochs, witnessing local histories and traditions.

Fragments are reconfigured into new constellations. A chamber built from reclaimed police windows offers a paradoxical experience: inside, one perceives only an endless curved extension of space, while from outside, the figure within remains visible but blind to the world beyond—a metaphor for perception, exposure, and ideological constraint. Elsewhere, a firstly appearing as a mystical creature, horse saddle rests as if the animal’s body still lingers within—an architecture of flesh and memory—juxtaposed with a Greek theatre mask. In Jungian dream symbolism, the horse embodies desire and instinct, yet here no single journey is prescribed; every object resists fixed meaning, forming a constellation of signs and associations. Scattered across the space, golf sticks burst from doorways, evoking both play and aggression. Their presence introduces a sense of unease, recalling political gamesmanship and the spectacle of power—from the manicured lawns of leisure to the symbolic terrain of governance.

Together, these elements form a landscape of thresholds—between private memory and public ideology, craft and commodification, the seen and unseen—inviting visitors to confront, interpret, and engage with the layered meanings of our time.

Lesia Topolnyk is a Dutch-Ukrainian architect, artist, researcher, and film director based in the Netherlands, working internationally. Raised in Ukraine’s shifting political landscape and educated as an architect, she investigates how invisible forces shape human behavior and manifest in physical and spatial environments. Her practice spans immersive multimedia installations, visionary projects, and experimental designs, connecting local contexts to global narratives and addressing urgent societal and planetary challenges. Through her practice Studio Space Station, she operates across architecture, art, and politics, fostering dialogue, experimentation, and systemic reflection. Her work has been recognized with numerous Dutch and international awards, including the Prix de Rome.

MAGAZIN is an exhibition space for contemporary architecture in Vienna run by Jerome Becker and Matthias Moroder. MAGAZIN presents the work of local and international architects in solo exhibitions that are especially conceived for the spaces in the Rembrandtstrasse location—framed by corresponding lectures, panel discussions and publications.