Alexandra Hunts
2025
Born in Ukraine at the edge of the Soviet Union’s collapse and later relocating to Western Europe, my practice traces the friction, entanglement, and collapse between systems—scientific, political, economic, and personal. Working across installation, sculpture, sound, performance, and writing, I build slow, research-driven projects that bring together fragments from science, war, and history, often rooted in overlooked materials, obsolete technologies, or fragile infrastructures.
My work often begins in dialogue—with physicists, factory workers, soldiers, and machines—and unfolds as a process of translation: turning correspondence, raw matter, or industrial detritus into sensorial installations that reveal the hidden labor behind power. The most recent project, One Horsepower Is More Than the Power of One Horse, merges a kinetic sculpture with wartime letters, exploring collapse and endurance through electricity, muscle, and metaphor. Whether working with red mud from Ukrainian alumina plants, neon gas used in Cold War weapons, or seismic sand simulations, I seek to understand how systems break—and what survives in the dust.
Science and craft remain central to my process, not as opposites but as parallel ways of sensing and shaping the world. Across all projects, I return to questions of legitimacy: Who gets to define knowledge? What labor remains invisible? How do we measure impact—by energy, attention, or memory?
My practice is a continuous effort to reassemble meaning from materials that are unstable, interrupted, or at risk of being erased—shaped, always, by the quiet urgencies of war, migration, and the residual weight of history.