Today we speak with Kateryna Voloshyna, artist, curator and founder of REQOLLE, a Lisbon-based gallery dedicated to contemporary collage as an autonomous artistic medium. Ahead of her solo exhibition MY NATIVE TONGUE, we discuss collage as a visual language, the transformation of personal experience into metaphor, and the shifting relationship between the artist’s intention and the viewer’s interpretation.
The title of your exhibition, MY NATIVE TONGUE, immediately suggests that collage is something more fundamental to you than a technique. When did collage begin to feel like your own language?
I’ve worked with collage commercially for eight years, but it became my language when I found myself overwhelmed by emotions I couldn’t put into words. By combining images on paper, I could express exactly what I was feeling and allow the viewer to understand and share in that feeling with me, without using a single word.
The works in the exhibition emerge from personal experiences, emotional states and fragments of lived reality. How do you translate something deeply personal into an image without turning it into a literal narrative?
I think metaphors and archetypes are what make this possible. I try to go as deep as I can into the meanings behind each image, while keeping their combination precise enough. This allows something very personal to remain open, without becoming literal.
You describe your working process as intuitive. What does intuition mean in your practice? Do you usually begin with an emotion, an image, or simply with a fragment that attracts you?
Usually it begins with a feeling. I don’t know what I want to make, but I know what I want it to feel like. Then I start looking through images until something clicks. From there, one image leads to another.
Collage begins with images that already have their own histories and meanings. What interests you about removing an image from its original context and allowing it to become something entirely different?
That is probably my favourite part of collage. An image can have a very clear meaning on its own, but the moment you place something unexpected next to it, that meaning shifts.
Your exhibition deliberately avoids a fixed narrative and leaves the work open to multiple interpretations. How important is it for you to lose a certain degree of control once the work encounters the viewer?
I find it fascinating to follow the viewer’s train of thought. For this exhibition, I’ve left one piece deliberately unfinished, inviting the viewer’s interpretation to become part of the work itself. I’m curious to see where it leads, and I’ll share the final result at the end of the exhibition.
There is often a tension in collage between fragmentation and coherence, between things that do not belong together and the new reality they create. Is that tension something you consciously seek in your work?
Yes, for me it’s a kind of game. I look for combinations that disrupt the way we are used to seeing an image and create something unexpected instead. It’s playful, but it also makes the viewer pause and try to make sense of what they see.
Why was it important for you to present collage specifically as an independent visual and narrative language rather than simply as one artistic technique among many?
I want to be in dialogue with the viewer. That interaction and exchange of interpretations is what energises me.
REQOLLE was founded from your conviction that collage needs more physical, intellectual and institutional space. What did you feel was missing in the contemporary art world when it came to the way collage was being presented and understood?
Collage is everywhere, but somehow it is still often treated as secondary. I wanted to give it a space where it doesn’t have to explain or justify itself. At REQOLLE, collage is simply the main character.
How does your position as an artist influence the way you curate other artists at REQOLLE? Do you approach their work differently because you understand the medium from inside the creative process?
Of course. I know how personal this process can be, even when the final image looks simple. As a curator, this helps me understand the work, strengthen it within the space, and communicate what matters to the viewer without taking away the artist’s own voice. Being an artist also makes me more empathetic to everything that happens before the work reaches the wall.
We are living in a culture saturated with images, where photographs are constantly copied, edited, displaced and recontextualised. Do you think this makes collage an especially relevant medium today?
Absolutely. We consume hundreds of images every day, usually without really looking at them. Collage breaks that automatic response. By placing familiar images in unfamiliar relationships, it makes us stop and look again.
Through both your exhibition and REQOLLE, you seem to be proposing not only a different way of looking at collage, but a different way of reading images altogether. What would you like a viewer to begin noticing differently after encountering your work?
I would like people to trust their own associations more. To look at an image and not immediately ask what it is supposed to mean, but notice what it makes them feel. There is no dictionary for this language.
