Katya Kabalina (1995, Ukraine) is an artist and curator based in Italy. She graduated from the St. Petersburg University of Culture with a degree in Museology and completed a Masters in Cultural Studies at the Russian State University for the Humanities. She also studied at the BAZA Institute, an experimental educational programme founded by Anatoly Osmolovsky and Svetlana Baskova.

An Open Studio is the result of a one-month working session at Stone Oven House, the residency where she has been living for three months thanks to the support of Artist At Risk, a network institution that helps artists around the world whose freedom and lives are in danger. Kabalina, who worked as a curator in Russia and was involved in various forms of social and political activism, was forced to flee the country after the invasion of Ukraine began. She moved to Europe, where she began to develop her own artistic practice, exploring themes of affectivity, death, social memory and personal trauma.

The series of Sensible Objects produced during the mini-residency represents an attempt to poetically assimilate the dramatic experience of war and its political and existential consequences, such as forced emigration and the disruption of family ties and friendships. These works, made of concrete, earth and textiles, combined with some second-hand clothes found at a small flea market near the place of residence, are the result of an instinctive approach that organically follows the expressive and narrative potential hidden behind the innate qualities of the materials. Through a very intimate look at the objects, the artist is able to dissolve our gaze into her world of unconsciousness and vulnerability, youth and relics. A dense, intuitive and telepathic dimension in which life and death, sculpture and object trouvé, symbolism and poetry coexist.