Valerie Karpan: Hydraulic Border Intervals

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Hydraulic Border Intervals is an installation and artistic research project that explores borders as environmental and infrastructural conditions emerging through the entanglement of military violence, changing landscapes, and the circulation of people, water, and sound.

Installed within the circular architecture of the Tieranatomisches Theater (TA T), the work enters into dialogue with the building’s layered histories of observation and experimentation, as well as its proximity to the Panke River. It draws on field recordings and found materials developed through collaborative research on Khortytsia Island (Ukraine) together with Maryna Marynichenko and Vlemens Poole, while incorporating recordings from the Evros Delta (Greece) by Lefteris Krysalis. It unfolds as a listening environment structured through interference and shifting relations between bodies, sound, and space.

What to expect

The public activation on 4 July marks the installation’s first collective presentation through

• listening sessions,

• an artist talk,

• and conversations with participants.

These encounters extend the project’s exploration of transmission as an ecological and social process unfolding amid interrupted mobility and unstable conditions of perception.

Hydraulic Border Intervals invites visitors to navigate partial signals and shifting sonic relations, asking how knowledge continues to circulate when the channels through which it moves remain unstable.

About the artist

Valerie Karpan is a researcher and practitioner whose activities include both artistic and scientific contexts, reflecting a commitment to inclusive education, participatory art, and innovative curatorial practices. Her main research areas are participatory art, colonial, and decolonial discourses in the context of Eastern European Studies, memory representation and commemoration, and participatory mapping.

She is the co-founder of the NGO Cultural Geographies and its Children’s Geographies initiative. Since 2018, she has been a participant in the Variable Name art group. She was a resident within the Gaude Polonia Scholarship, Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of Poland (2018); a participant in the Curatorial Platform at the PinchukArtCentre (2020); and took part in residencies at the WRO Art Centre in Wrocław, Poland (2019), and the Ukrainian Calling programme in Frankfurt (Oder), Germany (2021). She was the 2022 Art Prospect Fellow (Art Prospect, New York), dedicated to researching socially engaged practices with US colleagues. She has been nominated for the PinchukArtCentre Prize 2025.

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Credits

Artist
Valerie Karpan

Research and Artistic Collaborators

Field recordings and field research (Khortytsia Island, Ukraine)
Maryna Marynichenko
Clemens Poole

Field recordings (Evros Delta, Greece)
Lefteris Krysalis

Sound development
Jean-Daniel Tömör
Lefteris Krysalis

Conceptual conversations
Maryna Marynichenko
Clemens Poole
Lefteris Krysalis
Yurii Tymoshenko (Mokri Dereva)
Roman Kahal
Jehor Polishchuk

Material contributions
Mariia Piletska (seasonal photographic prints)
Yevheniia Maior (objects)

Sculptural contributions, animation
Oleksii Voitykh

A production of
inherit. heritage in transformation, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Directors
Prof. Dr. Eva Ehninger
Prof. Dr. Sharon Macdonald

Scenography and Production
Caspar Pichner

Coordination
Elisaveta Ernst

Partners / funded by

With funding from the:
Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space