The painting series “Places of Change” is the result of my research about the uncanny and painting. The uncanny (German Unheimliche) describes a psychological condition that involves feelings of uncertainty, in particular regarding the reality of who one is and what one is experiencing. This derealisation makes a person feel anxious and unnerved. Uncanny is not a direct fear - it is an unsettling gut feeling. It is hard to define uncanny because it exists between strange and familiar, genuine and artificial, material and ephemeral, past and present, intriguing and appalling, presence and absence, feeling and thought. I knew that if I wanted to experience and capture the uncanny, I had to travel and explore various locations. During the three years of this project, I have visited approximately twenty different places: war and military history museums, authentic locations that transformed into memorial museums, sites that contain collections of original objects, and places of memory that are not institutionalized. This research revealed that the experience of a place is affected by intangible factors such as genius loci, weather, and time conditions that create a specific atmosphere, tellings, intimate and personal stories, and individual experiences, as well as factors that are easier to identify: aesthetical codes (that are used in visual culture and associated with danger and fear) and the role of the museum institution which conceptually constructs the narrative of the place.

I aimed to depict the rich atmosphere of the places of change and the quiet anxiety of our times.