New Window – #2: Ola Lanko

In this episode Ola Lanko explains her (non) position as a visual artist and photographer. She speaks about education, as a student herself and being a teacher now, her background in the Ukraine and her inspirations, mainly not from the creative world. With her work Ola would like to make us aware of the importance and danger of image–forming, especially in a moment of time where everybody (for instance with their cell phones) is a co–creator of a directed representation of the world, that is often presented as reality.

In her artistic practice, Ola Lanko pushes the vision, understanding and perception to the point where it breaks down. She works in a systematic but intuitive way combining ideas of rationalists and romanticists in a single experiment to understand the world, bring curiosity and bewilderment to peoples daily practice. Ola explores the notion of photographic image and expands it into photogenic installations and photographic projects. She explores parallel knowledge production and histories that are created by images. Working with metaphors and references she rearranges them in a new non-linear narratives. Ola believes that in order to deal with new conditions of visual information, while the world is being transformed into images, it is necessary to develop a qualitative approach to the process of looking, have a critical attitude towards images and be aware of its role in the overall perception of the surrounding.