Subtextura is an ongoing multidisciplinary project by the Strawberry Kiss Sweet Trinity collective dedicated to reflecting on shady areas of socio-political discourse and ambivalences that populate our everyday life. The project invites the viewers to decode concealed messages and to search for non-obvious answers — and, at times, non-obvious questions.
SKST’s first piece, Subtextura-I, which they contributed to 2025 CultTech Summit in Vienna, is presented in the small exhibition space. With an updated scenography, it once again examines the phenomenon of conspiracy thinking. Developed with technical and conceptual support from Sergiu Adrelean and Artivive and employing its augmented reality technology to semantically extend the staged reality in an escape room gameplay, SKST transforms everyday objects — often branded, omnipresent, and at times rendered invisible by banner blindness — in order to suggest that someone else, apparently, may see the world in an entirely different way.
For the opening of La Cotorra Galería, SKST premieres the second iteration of their project. Subtextura-II is a graphic series which reorients the attention from the anthropological survey of today towards speculation about not-so-distant tomorrow and translates the idea of layered perception into the language of visible light. Under the daylight, the pieces displaying speculative technologies of the future blend various pictorial paradigms and communicative strategies — from engineering blueprints and AI-generated vector images to marketing slogans and science-like commentary. In this way, the artists develop a meta-collage that juxtaposes not images but rather modalities, revealing the trend towards deeper entanglement between commerce, science and technology. Yet when the normal light goes down, UV lamps bring the underside to the fore, ranging from credible critique to blatant conspiracy theorising, thus blurring the boundaries of the normative perception of reality. In this way, the disoriented viewer gets caught in a rhythmic choreography of light and darkness, visible and hidden, fiction and truth.
About the collective
Strawberry Kiss Sweet Trinity (est. 2025, unbased geographically) is an artistic collective founded by Olga Lukianova, Artem Timonov and Peter Voznesensky. Borrowing its tongue-in-cheek ready-made title from a Starbucks bun, the artists extend contemporary media and technologies in unconventional ways. Operating on the crossroads of diverse realms from politics and economics to media art and stage design, SKST balances between piercing social critique and a plea for humanist sentiment in the interesting times that we live in.
Olga Lukianova (b. 1997) is an editor, media manager and scriptwriter. Formerly involved in political journalism, she is currently working across various cultural fields.
Artem Timonov (b. 1998) is an art curator, researcher and critic with backgrounds in philosophy, economics, political theory and data science.
Peter Voznesensky (b. 2002) is an award-winning visual artist, XR creator and set designer focusing on new media and computing, exhibiting globally.