The idea of responsibility being a response to what your essential humanity demands is devolving into being responsible for making on-time payments for the services of comfort providers. Ethical relationships are replaced by regular payments in the "private office." These sterile transactions not only shun the principles of human existence, but they also rather artfully absorb humans' sensitivity and passion for their preemptively regulated, artificial world. The ease the system provides is so seductive that, like a superhighway, it forces a person's obligation to their own human existence and to the fate of humankind to meander along back roads.

Instead of a virtual "private office," Budnikov has constructed a real one inside Inken and Hinrich Baller's very personal space in Berlin, but by exhibiting it virtually, he revokes the limited access that is required by the private office. He fills, or rather inundates, the interior with artworks that challenge the viewer; riding the current of this moment in history, they encroach on the furniture, hang partially suspended in the air, and change the room's architectural design, taking more space than they would usually be allotted. The painted canvases seem to have cast off their frames, their skins drawing closer to whoever is ready to stand among them.

The principle for arranging the works in the exhibition rooms balances on the point where order begins to emerge from chaos, while the interplay of the abstract artworks in the space and with the space creates a regime of solidarity. Budnikov establishes an order inside his "Private Office" whereby the way each element corresponds to this newly created real space suggests that our responsibility is no less real.

If we compare how this concept, which seems purely technical, is rendered as "Private Office" in Ukrainian and as "My Account" in German (and English), then it raises an ethical question about the personal account from which anyone who claims to belong to civilized humankind must pay according to the demands of their own conscience. For delaying payment threatens the existence of civilization itself.

*"Private office" (osobystyi kabinet) is the Ukrainian term for the virtual space where a customer maintains their online accounts.

Vlada Ralko, 2024

translated by Larissa Babij 

The exhibition is organized within the framework of the residency program and with the support of the Chervonechorne Art Group