open studio: Natalia Matsenko & Yuri Yefanov

We are pleased to invite you to the open studio of Natalia Matsenko and Yuri Yefanov! The curator and artist are part of our artist and research residency program from September to October 2025. Under the title City Visions 2050 – Between Reality and Utopia, they invite you to join them for an exchange.

Natalia Matsenko is an independent curator, art critic, and lecturer. She focuses on the landscape and environmental transformations, human and nonhuman communities as well as networks, new media, and cultural heritage preservation. Natalia’s practice draws on relations between ecological and political action and art and their short and long-term impacts on the environmental systems. Born in Cherkasy, Ukraine, Matsenko graduated from the Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts with a master’s degree in Theory and History of Art. In recent years, she curated exhibitions and participated in residencies in Germany, Ukraine, Denmark, Belgium, Netherlands, Switzerland, Poland, and Mexico, among others. Several projects have been made in cooperation with the European External Action Service. She was a fellow curator at Kunstmuseum Bochum, Germany (2022–2024) and recently was in a curatorial residency at Cité internationale des arts, Paris. 

Yuri Yefanov is a Ukrainian artist and filmmaker whose work explores the otherworldly digital dimensions of computer-generated imagery. His digital systems and mythologies investigate the interplay between everyday life and politics. Yefanov’s projects have been exhibited at numerous venues including the International Film Festival Rotterdam, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Genève Centre d’Art Contemporain, and PinchukArtCentre in Kyiv, among others. His artistic practice focuses on the future, landscapes, war, and ecology. Using a game engine to generate digital simulations of diverse decentralized societies, he cultivates utopian visions of a distant future of humanity. Originating from Crimea, which was annexed from Ukraine in 2014, the artist frequently incorporates this landscape into his work. Through digital simulations, he reactivates “ghost areas” and restores the connection between the landscape and the collective memory of it.