Continuing HKW’s terrace flags commission, Karabinovych proposes several messages with multiple possible interpretations, containing traces of both irony and melancholy, lighthearted humour and sober seriousness.

At once soliloquy, inner monologue, and public discussion, the imagined conversation formed by the sentences on the flags: ‘Do I have a right to be here?’, ‘All the more reason to continue’, and ‘Do what you do be do be do be do be do’ implies degrees of extrapolation and bounces between the existential and the contingent, the personal and the institutional, the intimate and the political.

Among many vexed questions and contextual readings, these phrases point to issues of migration, the privilege of being able to choose between safe places, and the constant doubts and revisions of the position from whence artists speak.

A third flag, with a tongue-twister-like play of words, echoes the linguistic experiments of Zaum poetry and could be taken as a poetic answer to these questions by accentuating rhythm, musicality, and jouissance.