This cave-like room, an installation part of the exhibition On Your Hands is an ode to Petra's perception of time passage, memory, and isolation. The main character is silicone, an industrial material that has the quality to freeze time in a rather nostalgic manner. She aims to amplify this feeling using various mediums and repurposing the existing elements in the space.

Silicone mural made by hand and silicone gun
414x260cm

Chipboard bench covered with silicone glue
150x90cm

Sound design by Oleg Solovey
Bench in collaboration with Konstantin Maksimov

Eight Gallery is an art space run by Tereza Nováková and Petra Popangelova, launched in May 2023, located in the basement of Vonder's K55 residential complex in Berlin. Facing one another, the gallery features eight identical rooms, crafting a cohesive setting.

Their aim is to share the vision and the mastering of each artist's distinct skills and style. Merging traditional tools with digital approach and analog manipulation, balancing tangible and immaterial. Diving into secret societies and groups, discovering cryptic elements on the surfaces, raw and realistic but with contradicting mystical imprints of daily life.

They want to showcase individual methods of utilizing different materials and objects, processes of experimentation and exploration, and how they result in an artwork. Additionally, they actively repurpose materials sourced from film sets, production companies, storage rooms, and construction sites.

With innovative use of mixed media and visually arresting compositions inspired by the natural and artificial world, the exhibitions comment on social but soulful topics and experiences.

Curation and exhibition design: Tereza Novakova (@terez.novak / tereznovak.xyz) Petra Popangelova

For collaborations and ideas: Mail: eight.ggallery@gmail.com Instagram: @8eightgallery

In the first of four site-specific installations as a result of the open call “Like the State, the Toilet is Never Neutral”, Petra Popangelova turns the attention to the invisible traces that exist in the toilet. By materialising them in organically shaped ornaments, she creates an archive of the effects of the public toilet’s multiple users as well as the activities that have occurred in it. The choice of material is not an end in itself but an integral part of the architecture of the toilet, the invisible agent, the unsung hero that holds everything together. Its ephemeral aesthetic qualities bring about a direct association to the invisible marks that we, as users, leave behind, thus layering the space with experiences and meanings that rid the public toilet of its neutral everyday function.

In architecture, the drive towards utilitarianism has made ornaments useless, obsolete objects and in contemporary times an object of kitsch. But beyond architecture’s obsession with utility and function, Petra’s work is “rethinking the physical connection between the human as an artisan and the building as an entity.” This commentary is not only on a conceptual but on a material level. Contrasting the aesthetic value of ornaments with the utilitarian quality of the material used for their creation makes the former an object of utility and grants the latter with an aesthetic quality that is usually neglected. Thus, form and function fuse and intertwine in such a way that is impossible to dissociate them from one another.

There is a certain notion of nobleness and romanticism in the production of unpractical and seemingly nonsensical objects. Perhaps it is rationality that makes us human, but it is benevolence that makes us humane. It is that human touch, metaphorical and physical, that elevates the public toilet from a strictly functional space to a place where stories unfold and intertwine, stories of violence and affection alike.