For Art Basel Statements, SOPHIE TAPPEINER presents a solo installation by Irina Lotarevich.

Bringing together a new body of wall sculptures, the presentation examines the structures through which contemporary life is organised, measured, and imagined. Drawing on visual languages associated with financial markets, administrative systems, and industrial production, Lotarevich creates works in which abstract frameworks encounter traces of the body, oscillating between order and instability, abstraction and embodiment.

A recurring element throughout the installation is a series of small stainless steel sculptures distributed across the booth walls. Their folded forms recall the paper fortune tellers used in children’s games, invoking ideas of chance, prediction, destiny, and fortune. Repeated throughout the space, these modular units establish a rhythmic, grid-like environment that functions simultaneously as sculpture, pattern, and architectural intervention. While their serial arrangement suggests the logic of a system, subtle variations between individual elements introduce unpredictability within the repeating structure.

Interspersed among these works are larger sculptural panels that draw on the visual language of financial heat maps and other forms of data visualisation. Grids, compartments, and graph-like forms evoke systems designed to classify, compare, and forecast. In Lotarevich’s hands, however, these structures become unstable and ambiguous. Information appears fragmented, scales shift, and organisational frameworks fail to produce clear meaning. What is typically employed to render complex realities legible instead reveals its own speculative and constructed nature.

All of the sculptural panels incorporate enlarged casts of the artist’s skin, taken from the inner surface of the palm and roughly cast in aluminium. These traces of the body introduce a tactile and intimate register into otherwise industrial compositions. Rather than representing the body directly, they function as imprints of touch, labour, and presence, bringing lived experience into proximity with abstract systems of calculation, organisation, and control.

Across the installation, Lotarevich explores the relationship between individual agency and collective structures, prediction and uncertainty, and the visible frameworks that organise contemporary life and the realities that exceed them. Through a precise sculptural language rooted in and shaped by metalworking processes such as cutting, bending, welding, forging, patination, and casting, she reveals how systems that promise coherence and foresight remain contingent, unstable, and deeply entangled with human experience.