Lesia Vasylchenko will present an artist talk about her recent projects and research exploring the concept of Chronesthetic Wounds, alongside her ongoing work on speculative temporalities such as Tachyonic Data and Chronosphere. She will also discuss her current installation at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and share insights into upcoming projects.

Time is no longer only lived but continuously measured, computed, and re-experienced through processes of sensing that operate across data, matter, and signal. When war and ecological collapse unfold across intertwined temporal scales, time itself fractures. Destruction is immediate, yet its signals persist. Ruined cities, craters in bombed grain fields, and scorched forests leave perceptible imprints – scars, memories, data traces. In geological or material terms, these are physical deformations that mark the passage of time. In cultural or psychological terms, emotional and historical pasts shape how the present is experienced.

This state may be understood as chronoesthesia – the sensing of overlapping temporalities distributed across human, technological, and ecological systems. Chronesthesia, the entanglement of past, present, and anticipated futures, becomes a contemporary condition that continuously records and recalibrates its own temporality. It is a condition through which satellite imaging technologies, environments, and human perception collectively sense, store, and replay time. Chronoesthesia thus shifts from a cognitive faculty to a planetary mode of mediation: the sensing of time through data, matter, and radiation, where technologies enact a temporal awareness once reserved for human consciousness. In sites of ongoing destruction, these echoes manifest as a chronesthetic wound, the memory of trauma made legible in the folds of time.

Part of BEK Symposium The Only Lasting Truth is Change 2025: Voice, Seed, Brutality. 

Lesia Vasylchenko
Lesia Vasylchenko (b. Kyiv, Ukraine) is an artist and a researcher. Her practice spans video, photography, and installation, focusing on the intersections of visual culture, media technologies, and chronopolitics. Vasylchenko holds a degree in Journalism from Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv and a degree in Fine Art from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts. Her work has been shown, among others, at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Munch Museum and Henie Onstad Art Centre. She received the Sandefjord Kunstforening Art Award (2023), the PinchukArtCentre Prize Main Award (2025), and is currently nominated for the Future Generation Art Prize (2027). Her work is part of the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma / Finnish National Gallery in Helsinki, Finland.