Olena Newkryta.
“You see? That which intended to enlighten the world, in practice darkened it.”
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Anne Faucheret
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Published in Camera Austria International, Issue 170, 2025
The postindustrial age of digital and disembodied capitalism is characterized by abstraction, dematerialization, and invisibilization. These processes intensify processes of rationalization and domination initiated long before. The tension between the apparent volatility of neo-capitalism, its firm grasp on bodies, territories, imaginaries, and knowledge, and the material and symbolic devastation it causes is at the heart of Olena Newkryta’s work. The Vienna-based artist investigates this tension in a material, situated, and embodied way. Departing from concrete situations and specific sites, she weaves around them multilayered and polyphonic narratives, which unravel complex entanglements between technology, labor, science, and economy, and which trace unpleasant genealogies and open new future paths. At the same time, the artist pays careful attention to her protagonists, human or nonhuman.
These protagonists are working bodies, often invisible female working bodies. In Patterns Against Workers(2023), the motif of the “pattern”—technical, spatial, social, aesthetic, and psychological—enables the artist to connect the beginnings of automation in textile production with the rationalization of space, the standardization of gestures, the alienation of psyches, the internalization of control, and the fragmentation of the social body. The film interlaces snapshots of archival material—including punch cards, looms, and pattern drawings—with filmed sequences and screen captures. Scenes from an Austrian quilt factory feature female workers at their sewing machines and in storage spaces. Shots of a bed feature the soft surface of the bedsheets and sometimes hands holding a smartphone and gently swiping images of sheets. Screen captures feature AI trainers performing scripted gestures. The workers at the factory are filmed alone, either from behind or fragmented, the camera zooming in on their most solicited body parts—hands directing the textile into the machines or feet activating the electric pedal. Anonymity and isolation also characterize other forms of labor in the age of deregulation and self-entrepreneurship. Through the montage, the artist draws a parallel between the condition of (female) industrial wage labor and home-based freelance work—including artistic work. In one case, maximal framing for minimum agency; in the other, the framing disappears altogether. With similar outcomes: exhaustion, burnout, depression, nightmares.
"For a moment, remember the hands that once punched those holes. Remember them. The globally scattered force clicking at the backstage of the machine, in solitude, training the eyes of the machine."
— Olena Newkryta, Patterns Against Workers
The very first sequence of the film, in blue tones, is a slow camera closely panning across the soft surface of a blanket, suggesting cocooning comfort. Later, the bed turns to a working desk where research and cognitive labor take place, endlessly. The artist includes herself in her work, at work. In doing so, she reflects not only the precarity of artistic labor, but also the ambivalence of its role in the consolidation of the neoliberal model of a flexible worker, drawn by self-optimization, self-profiling, and self-exploitation. The film’s final sequence blends artistic and work performance. Workers who had previously been filmed in the workplace perform the gestures of their daily labor in midair and in front of a blue screen. The repetitive gestures become a “mechanical ballet.” At the same time, they also become the raw material for the artistic work. The labor force becomes a purveyor of knowledge, but the extraction never seems to end.
This Aggregate of Images That Is the Universe is a multipart, site-specific video installation. In its current presentation, it is composed of dispersed elements. Scattered smartphones on tripods display a text-based film evoking mental images of maps and constellations. White perforated hanging shirts bear printed names and credit lines. A translucent foil pasted on a large glass window takes up the motif of a star constellation in negative and alters the panorama view behind it. Finally, a bluish-filtered film is projected onto a punched screen, repeating the constellation motif again. Olena Newkryta investigates the Western modern scientific project and its capture of the whole world via technologies of observation, image production, accumulation, and classification. More precisely, the artist examines Harvard University’s early twentieth-century attempt to map the entire starry sky, as well as the technical infrastructures and the human resources mobilized. The film begins with a black-and-white blurred image. The camera takes a long time to focus, to finally reveal a constellation, the Small Magellanic Cloud. Only visible from the southern hemisphere, the mapping of both galaxies from the Magellanic Cloud occurred through though hundreds of thousands of photographic glass plates shot in Peru, at the Arequipa Observatory—built by the American university in the late nineteenth century. In order to compile the fragmented and scattered information, including its remoteness, and to arrange it on a coordinate system, female astronomers—called “computers”—were hired to do the backbreaking work of counting, distinguishing, and classifying. They were paid less than factory workers. The artwork magnifies astronomical imperialism and Western anthropocentric hubris, extracting material and resources, accumulating data and knowledge, erasing and renaming, and ultimately capturing everything on earth and what lies beyond under the premise of the Cartesian split between mind and matter, object and subject.
"This is not an image but an act of seeing that becomes an act of reinventing the world.
This is not an image but the blind chase for an objective truth.
85. On a cloudless night, I see how roots connect, how relationships unfold. Light is tracking our time. Stars are navigating our movements."
— Olena Newkryta, This Aggregate of Images That Is the Universe (STARS)
Olena Newkryta’s practice shows the connection between the capitalist colonial patriarchal extraction regime and specific regimes of representation and vision that underly it. Visitors are invited to watch and look through filters and frames: images appear on a smartphone screen within the camera frame, a magnifying glass enlarges figures, an optic lens takes time to focus, a slow photographic shutter is added as image transition. On one half of the film installation’s double-side screen—its hand-created perforation reproducing the photographic configuration of the Small Magellanic Cloud—light beams traverse the holes and cast glittering dots onto the surrounding surfaces, making them an integral part of the work. The dispositive creates a dispersion of the filmic images in space and seems to capture at the same time bodies in motion. The filmic and photographic image is never shown as neutral, transparent, or ethereal, but always as the result of work and even manipulation, and as emerging from a specific context.
This context, this “aggregate,” is the regime of visualization within which liberal subjects are draped, and within which they have been trained to make sense of the world. It is made up of maps of conquest of the earth and sky, of diagrams, lists, and tables. It comprises official “scientific” archival pictures, depicting the “whole world” seen from the vantage point of the moon, the sky seen from the top of the world, but also othered bodies seen from the colonial ethnographer’s (technical) eye. This context forces seeing in a certain way and prevents seeing certain things. Olena Newkryta, on the contrary, searches the archives for traces of maintenance, of support, of sustaining. Images and words turn the viewer’s attention on workers digging pathways, a donkey transporting material, women holding hands, a child sleeping on an adult’s lap. The storytelling lingers rather on life-reproducing activities at the observatory than on scientific knowledge production, as if to ward off the logic of computation and extraction—maybe even to detect unintentional or discrete resistance practices.
"19,000 feet above. Someone was watching the clouds. And someone was building paths through shifting sands. Someone was scouting. Someone was climbing. Someone was maintaining the lab. Someone was caring. Someone was leaning. Someone was keeping the records. Someone was a body. Someone was an eye. Someone was anonymous, collective labor."
— Olena Newkryta, This Aggregate of Images That Is the Universe (STARS)
The artist envisages artistic research as care and she drafts restorative gestures, unearthing unofficial (her)stories, paying special attention to invisibilized bodies and stories. The (female) voices traversing Olena Newkryta’s works carry this mission. Guiding through Patterns Against Workers, a soft, determined, and trustful voice addresses an imagined worker from the position of a confidant, a historian, a doctor, a caregiver, all at once. The emphasis on sound, touch, and texture contradict the hegemony of vision, even within the visual. Images are haptic, rays of light touch bodies, hands appear and reappear, touching, caressing, and manipulating—highlighted by the camera frame and the editing. The video installation To Hand. A Projection for the Palm (2017) is dedicated to hands and addresses the perceptual and affective processes of seeing, touching, and feeling, of carrying, caring, and longing. With a projector but without screen, the video manifests only if bodies allow its light to cast images on their surface, phenomenologically linking the artwork and the physical presence of the viewer. The filmic sequences feature hands performing slow choreographic gestures somewhere in between a swipe, a wipe, a caress, a spell. The hands—filmed gently moving in the air—seem to physically interact with the viewers’ bodies when they touch them. A kind of magic indeed happens in the reception, reorganizing the affective relationship between viewers, artwork, and space; between public, private, intimate.
Olena Newkryta crafts a perceptual but also a speculative reorganization of affect(s), especially through the gaps, absences, and silences of the archive. The second sequence of This Aggregate of Images That Is the Universe (STARS) features a group of five performers collectively reenacting working gestures of the female astronomers, enumerating, counting, and drawing. The group sits on a projection foil spread out on the floor, resembling a large bed, in a photo studio—integrating the sites of artistic labor in the film. With a pencil, the performers outline stars, which are projected down from the ceiling, and which cast shadows on their bodies, too, immersing them in the image of the starry sky. They draw. They murmur numbers. Their collective reenactment transforms counting into storytelling, works as an antidote against machinic memory. It becomes a collective celebration, an invocation of ghosts, and a polyphonic calling, reminding of the response-ability to look back at the past that lingers in the present, to stay haunted by the past and work with it.
"Not track, not path.
Nothing to be followed.
A place within my order, where the outside breaks in and disturbs it."
— Olena Newkryta, Ruins in Reverse
The short film Ruins in Reverse (2020) works through a multilayered haunting. It departs from a concrete and situated object: the ruin of a late-Soviet residential building for workers, lost in the middle of the Ukrainian southern steppe, having been inhabited for only ten years before being abandoned at the dismantling of the Soviet Union. The building is slowly disassembled as bricks are taken to build other constructions. The film transports the viewers in repeated—and somehow hesitant—peregrinations in and out of the building, and in a slightly unsettling journey through time and space. This journey is accompanied by a narrator diving into the promises—and wounds?—of the past, into the meanders and the reconfigurations of the present, by paying attention to material traces and by imagining feelings or unearthing collective memories. The artist appears, here, too, as a caregiver, for she builds a little shelter, or bench or altar, out of bricks she had gathered. A space to hold bodies and maybe spend time—to invent, now, futures for the ruins of the past.
Olena Newkryta’s practice follows the deep (indelible?) imprint of capitalist ideology in bodies, objects, images, and spaces—and the technologies and brutal processes through which this was achieved. Tracing the genealogies of contemporary subjugation and extraction, the artist does not stop there. Opting for materialist and polyphonic storytelling, she looks at the little daily revolutionary glitches made of contestation, persistence, and endurance, at moments of crisis or unproductivity, at practices of transmission beyond scientific logos and hegemonic vision, at the interstices in which extraction is challenged by love, attention, and care. In a contemporary global context of continuing wars and dispossession, increasingly precarious and exploitative conditions of labor, extreme inequality of access to resources, and environmental destruction, the unearthing and rethinking the interlinked matrices of capitalism to invent and experience new collective modes of existence and resistance is a political if not an existential urgency.
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Olena Newkryta is a visual artist based in Vienna (AT). Through films, installations, and textile pieces, Olena explores the interrelations between forms of marginalized labor, technological infrastructures, strategies of exploitation in contemporary capitalism, and gestures of resistance. Olena’s works have been presented at international exhibitions, screenings, and biennials such as WRO Media Art Biennale, Wrocław (PL), EYE Filmmuseum Amsterdam (NL), Kunstraum Lakeside, Klagenfurt (AT), Filmmuseum Wien, Vienna, and Kyiv International Short Film Festival (UA). Her practice has been awarded prizes such as the Outstanding Artist Award for Media Arts (2024) and the Prize of the City Duisburg for the Best Short and Middle Length Documentary Film (2023). In 2024, Newkryta was an artist-in-residence at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht (NL).
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Link to the artist's website
https://olenanewkryta.com/
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Image credits from left to right, from top to bottom
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1 • Olena Newkryta, Patterns Against Workers, 2023. Filmstill.
2 • Olena Newkryta, This Aggregate Of Images That Is The Universe (STARS), 2025. Exhibition view, Kunstraum Lakeside, 2025.
3 • Olena Newkryta, This Aggregate Of Images That Is The Universe (STARS), 2025. Filmstill.
4 • Olena Newkryta, To Hand. A Projection For The Palm, 2017. Exhibition view Le Studio, 2020. Photo : Lisa Truttmann
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Photos if not mentioned otherwise : Copyright Olena Newkryta
