09 january 2026, Flor Linckens
Marta & Slava at Kasteel Wijlre estate: an intriguing combination of fiction, science and poetry
Until 1 March, Kasteel Wijlre estate presents the exhibition ‘Hidden Messages’ by artist duo Marta & Slava (Marieke Severens Gallery). The duo, that consists of Marta Volkova and Slava Shevelenko, began their artistic practice in the underground art scene of St Petersburg in the 1980s, within an authoritarian system in which official truths were continually constructed. They operated outside the state-imposed frameworks, where socially realistic art functioned as the prescribed art form. That experience still forms an important foundation for their multidisciplinary practice, which is rooted in research into power structures, ideology, history, knowledge production and the collective imagination.
Their projects consistently operate at the intersection of fact and fiction, revealing how myths, ideologies and narratives come into being, circulate and become embedded in social consciousness. Marta & Slava: “We have always been interested in the emergence and functioning of collective mythology. We consistently seek to construct myths for the audience that are firmly rooted in reality, and then to make the process of that construction visible. (…) [These] projects usually result in space-filling installations. Objects, images, video projections and texts are interwoven into a narrative, a kind of film that you do not see on the screen, but in which you walk in and in which the unexpected of reality joins the imagination.”
In doing so, fiction almost becomes a critical philosophical instrument. At a time when facts are increasingly drowned out by emotion, opinion and deliberate disinformation, Marta & Slava ask how imagination might be deployed differently: not to mislead, but to make alternatives conceivable. Their fictitious institutes and archives are not an escape from reality, but rather a way of analysing and interrogating that reality more sharply.
In ‘Hidden Messages’, their focus shifts to the relationship between human beings and nature. For this presentation at Kasteel Wijlre estate, the duo developed a coherent series of new works. At its centre stands the fictional Mandragora Institute, a supposed international research centre in the Austrian Alps, devoted to invisible forms of communication between plants, insects and humans. The artists draw inspiration from existing insights in plant biology, such as the presence of ultraviolet patterns in flowers that are invisible to the human eye, yet crucial for pollination.
That scientific basis is subsequently expanded into a space of imagination, in which plants appear to communicate not only with insects, but also with humans within that ultraviolet spectrum. An alternative history emerges, realised through vases, sculptures, drawings and architectural scale models, in which a long-standing one-sided relationship is reversed by the artists: no longer only humans attempting to read, order and control nature, but a nature that itself takes the initiative and seeks contact with humanity. As a gesture of rapprochement, to face the crisis together. As a proposal for an alternative hierarchy in which nature gains a different form of agency, and as a counter-movement to a persistent anthropocentric worldview.
The works are aesthetically seductive and subtly disorienting, marked by a light, melancholic humour. In the exhibition booklet, for instance, one finds an interview with the board of the Mandragora Institute (by Manon Berns), which states that the fictional institute is currently closed due to renovation and reorganisation, while its field laboratory continues to research how plants respond to different musical styles, including classical music as well as techno and acid jazz.
Marta Volkova (1955) and Slava Shevelenko (1953) were born in St Petersburg, where they studied at the art academy. In 1991, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, they moved to the Netherlands. The duo lives and works in Maastricht. Their work has been shown at institutions including Het Nieuwe Instituut, the Bonnefantenmuseum, KIASMA, Museum Dr Guislain, SCHUNCK, Marres, West, Palais für Aktuelle Kunst and the present-day H’ART Museum. It is included in the collection of the Bonnefantenmuseum and in the Jo Crutzen Collection.
Tip: on Sunday 1 March, Kasteel Wijlre estate hosts a book launch with Marta & Slava, marking the presentation of their publication ‘Hidden Messages’. This event has been rescheduled to 1 March from its original date of 11 January due to ongoing winter weather. The estate also organises monthly introductory guided tours (in Dutch).
