Works

Polina Babaeva's Dreams of Japan unfolds as an imaginary interior in which vivid acrylic Pop Art meets a collector's attention to detail: a vase with Imari decoration, a fragment of wallpaper bearing Hokusai's wrestlers, silk robes. This lavish world resembles a carefully assembled set of unattainable desires — a visual moodboard in which Japan exists as a construction kit for an unreachable dream rather than as a geography.

Duck Stories draws on two narratives. Invented in the late 19th century, the rubber duck gained its extraordinary popularity only a century later and took on a life of its own as a cultural object. Unlike Florentijn Hofman's duck — which, for all its travels around the world, remains a giant replica of an ordinary yellow bath toy — the heroines of Polina Babaeva's Duck Stories point to the annual Pink Duck Race.

The event is organised by breast cancer charities not only to raise funds for research and patient care, but also to raise awareness of how vital early diagnosis is to saving lives. Pink rubber ducks take part in a mass swim along the canals of Antwerp and appear in different parts of the world as a symbol of hope, strength and solidarity.

The painting series The Young Pope and Batman explore the figure of the chosen one — the individual who personifies the highest form of exclusivity. In trivial situations or imagined circumstances, the Pope proves barely distinguishable from anyone else stripped of his privilege and singularity. Like a puzzle box, these paintings hold an inner narrative beneath the visible one: in Checkmate, the Pope — the white king — is defeated by an attacking black rook, a little girl, a new and sinless life.

Batman, a superhero and modern mythological figure endowed with special powers, finds himself in ordinary circumstances — outside his heroic mission — in the awkward position of an observer aware of his own irrelevance. Yet as characters of mass consciousness, the Pope and Batman are kindred: both share the loneliness of the hero in an ordinary world.