When: 14-15.03.2026
Where: Community Room of HIAP, Suomenlinnna B28, 00190 Helsinki
Bark! is a long-term artistic project in which the entangled lives of humans and dogs are explored by artist Stanislava Ovchinnikova and her senior dog Los', artist and researcher Kush Badhwar, and dog trainer Maria Batchenko. Together, we approach human-canine companionship, communication, and training as sites of artistic, social, and spatial inquiry.
Bark! (Volume 1) is the project's first public event, born of a desire to make visible some of the ideas, questions, and artworks that have been animating our practice from within as we work towards an exhibition at Gallery Augusta this November.
The full programme is free to attend—we look forward to seeing you there, and hope this is just the beginning of a longer conversation.
Bark! is realized with the support of the Kone Foundation.
FULL PROGRAM:
14.03.2026 / 17:15 / HIAP Community Room / Film screening
Works by Adrià Expòsit Goy, David Boffa, Edd Carr, Halima Ouardiri, and Sujay Iyer.
Co-curated by Stanislava Ovchinnikova and Kush Badhwar
Duration: ~ 1,5 hours
Free to attend upon registration: https://forms.gle/t8V72vV56ScDbG9V6
Kush Badhwar:
Bark!’s inaugural film screening at HIAP approaches dogs relationally: as participants (at times seemingly willing, at times not) in wider ecologies of work, care, extraction, and conflict. From the displaced violence of the meat trade in “Dogs on Fire” by Edd Carr, to labour unfolding within a larger field of human–non-human relations in “Mater Inerta” by Adrià Expòsit Goy, to the proximity of wolves, sheep, and guardians in “Sheep, Dog and Wolf” by Sujay Iyer, the programme traces uneasy forms of co-existence.
A second thread attends to the image itself: how dogs are looked at, recorded, and how their sound and image circulate. “The Treachery of Images (of Dogs)” by David Boffa probes what is left behind by way of images in a dog’s absence, while “Clebs (Mutts)” by Halima Ouardiri stays with the slow time of a refuge, where viewing becomes a kind of embodied waiting. Together, the works ask what the dog makes visible in us, and what remains obscured, within the shared space of the screening.
Stanislava Ovchinnikova:
The first volume of Bark! is a rather eclectic gathering—of dogs, and of the many roles, jobs, and symbolic meanings they carry for and instead of us.
In Edd Carr’s work, titled “Dogs on Fire,” we struggle to see the dogs treated as objects rather than subjects—dogs grabbed, thrown, fallen prey to paramilitary practices of intimidation. In his own text about this work, Edd situates the film within the broader conversation about violence displaced from the Global North to the Global South in service of European meat consumption. Haunting, near, a question of another kind of displacement might find us squirming in our seats, flinching at the sight of canine anguish: the question of the extent of displacement of our own thresholds of empathy and the means by which the animal’s assigned function—to feed, or to console us—may condition our response to its mistreatment.
Sujay Iyer’s “Sheep, Dog and Wolf” brings even closer into view the influence of human preconceptions on the lives of non-human animals. The film takes us to the northern mountains of Hungary, to which wolves are said to be returning after a hundred years of exile. Amid them, we follow Csaba, his five dogs, and many of his sheep, as they regard, each in their private way, such a return. The tens of thousands of years separating the dog from the wolf appear condensed in this film’s frame, as it slowly but surely burrows into the liminal space that allies domesticity with ferality.
Liminality comes to mind again while watching "Mater Inerta" by Adrià Expòsit Goy. Set in the Catalan mountains—the filmmaker's native region, under pressure from the exploitation of natural resources—the film explores the bond between a human and her dog against the disappearance of the latter. This, and the many other absences that follow, may leave us wondering about the extent to which dogs root us in our land, and whether, with more unease, this process draws them deeper into the structures we have built to exploit it.
David Boffa's "The Treachery of Images (of Dogs)" draws our attention to the nature of pictorial representation itself. The video-essay moves through a personal archive of canine footage, pondering its meaning in anticipation and recognition of multiple animal losses. In the face of the inevitable passing of dogs, the gradual obsolescence of photographic film (bound to the animal through its use of gelatin), and the growing scarcity of human—as opposed to robotic—viewership, what do these images do? And what, if anything, might our furry companions think of them?
In “Clebs (Mutts)” by Halima Ouardiri, dogs whimper, sleep, hump, eat, urinate, catch flies, pace back and forth, scratch their own bellies, bare teeth, hide from the sun, and we—the viewers—are amongst them, placed into the abject terrain with hundreds upon hundreds of foreign creatures whose language, after some time, we just might start to understand; whose waiting, in this film, just might become our own.
15.03 / 13:15 / HIAP Community Room / Workshop 1
Understanding Canine Body Language in Visual Media
Duration: ~1,5 hours
Facilitators: Artist Stanislava Ovchinnikova in person; dog trainer Maria Batchenko joining remotely.
Language: English, optional Ukrainian
Capacity: Maximum 10 participants
Free admission, please register and wait for confirmation: https://forms.gle/t8V72vV56ScDbG9V6
During this workshop, we will work with a selection of photographs featuring dogs. Guided by a dog trainer Maria Batchenko, we will improve our skills of reading canine body language. This is not always a straightforward process: a dog's “smile," for example, commonly read as happiness, may also be a signal of stress or physical pain—and learning to tell the difference is part of what we will practice together.
This workshop will be useful for dog owners, as body language interpretation skills can be applied in daily life to better understand your dog and support their wellbeing. It will also be of interest to cultural workers who engage with images of dogs in their practice, or anyone who wants to develop a sharper eye for reading the meaning of photographs featuring dogs.
15.03 / 15:15 / Community Room / Workshop 2
Critical Readings of Dog Images: Theory & Collage Practice
Duration: ~1,5 hours
Facilitator: Stanislava Ovchinnikova
Language: English
Capacity: Maximum 10 participants
Free admission, please register and wait for confirmation: https://forms.gle/t8V72vV56ScDbG9V6
*we recommend attending both workshops of the day in succession, but you are also welcome to register just for one.
In the second workshop of the day, facilitated by an artist and (former) dog photographer Stanislava Ovchinnikova, we will take a closer look at how dogs have been represented in visual culture in recent decades, drawing on a selection of examples from photography and advertisement. The main focus of the workshop is on the way dominant narratives about the role and nature of dogs influence, and are influenced by, the manner in which dogs are portrayed.
In the second half of this workshop, participants will be invited to work with collage as a tool for responding to, subverting, or reimagining the discussed images. The materials will be provided, and you're also welcome to bring your own!
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Information on the accessibility of the venue can be found here: https://www.hiap.fi/accessibility/
The event follows Safer Space Guidelines of HIAP (https://www.hiap.fi/safer-spaces-policy/).
If you’re visiting with a dog, please let us know in a registration form, and familiarize yourself with additional guidelines here. Thank you!
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About the people behind Bark!:
Stanislava Ovchinnikova (stanislavaovchinnikova.com) is a Kyiv-born, Helsinki-based artist and curator working with photography, performance, and writing to examine how memories of interpersonal, structural, and institutional violence shape our relationships with one another and the spaces we inhabit. Between 2023 and 2025, she worked as a guest curator at the Ukrainian dance film archive "Let The Body Speak." Her artistic work has been presented at places such as Titanik Gallery and Turun Taiteen Talo (FI), Kaunas Artists' House (LT), Sodas 2123 (LT), and PostPlay Lab (UA), with support from House of Europe, Goethe Institute, German Library Association, Frame Contemporary Art Finland, Föreningen Konstsamfundet, and Kone Foundation. Alongside her artistic practice, between 2016 and 2022 she worked as a commercial dog photographer. Since 2014, her professional and personal life has been unfolding alongside her mongrel dog, Los'.
Maria Batchenko (https://www.instagram.com/dogtraining.kyiv) is a Kyiv-based dog trainer with over a decade of experience in non-aversive approaches to the improvement of mutual understanding between dogs and people. One of the pioneering specialists in this field in Ukraine, she has taught thousands of families how to correctly interpret canine body signals, evaluate and fulfill their dogs’ needs, and develop common cross-species vocabularies. In 2014 she created “Relevant Training Questions” (“АВД”), the first large-scale platform for promoting non-violent dog training methods on Ukrainian and Russian-language internet, and since then has developed an extensive private consultancy practice for dog owners, most notably in the format of “Social Walking”—a revolutionary for Ukrainian context approach aimed at collective assistance in adaptation of reactive dogs.
Kush Badhwar (waydk.com) works across filmmaking, artistic and urban research to explore how sound and image unfold over time amid rapid and drastic changes in water and land use. His work has shown or screened at Addis Video Art Festival, Videobrasil, Chicago Architecture Biennial amongst others and has been undertaken through contexts such as Indian Foundation for the Arts’ Archival Fellowship (2014-15), Pad.ma’s Fellowship for Experiments with Video Archives (2018) and Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen’s Fellowship Program for Art and Theory (2021).