4 September – 11 October 2026

Vernissage: Thursday, 3rd September 2026 from 17:00 to 20:00 at Museum of Impossible Forms.

Museum of Impossible Forms presents Go East – Go West (2020–2023), a seven-part series of watercolour paintings by Panos Balomenos, shown as a site-responsive installation. Developed in response to Russia’s war against Ukraine, the series considers how geopolitical events enter personal consciousness, becoming entangled with memory, loss, cultural imagery, and lived experience.

Go East – Go West approaches conflict and warfare through a series of subjective and associative fragments. Each painting takes a different point of departure, drawing together images encountered through news media with personal references, architectural details, symbolic elements, and imagined scenarios. Balomenos began conceiving the series around 2019, having followed developments since Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, through its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and the devastating war that continues today. As the work evolved, what he encountered through mediated images became increasingly difficult to separate from episodes and environments within his own life. The paintings emerge from this unstable proximity: between what is witnessed from elsewhere and what is recognised through experience; between translocal histories and intimate forms of remembrance.

‍This tension also raises questions around the possibility—and limits—of approaching a conflict from a distance. The series remains with the complicated processes of identification through which the impact of foreign wars may nevertheless produce recognition, association, empathy, implication, and mobilisation across geographies. Cultural and architectural correspondences become points through which the artist reflects on how images travel, how memories attach themselves to political events, and how violence and war can disturb the perceived boundaries between elsewhere and here.

‍Across the seven works, painting operates as a space in which heterogeneous materials can coexist without being reconciled: personal grief and collective trauma, fact and fiction, political imagery and private memory, destruction and the desire to imagine otherwise. The works move between the causes and consequences of conflict and the more difficult question of what forms of resolution can still be pictured within conditions structured by violence.

Although the series emerged from the specific context of Ukraine, Balomenos understands it as opening onto a broader reflection on war and its recurrent presence in contemporary life. At a moment when the war in Ukraine continues alongside numerous other sites of military occupation, displacement, destruction, and genocide Go East – Go West asks what painting can do in relation to events whose scale exceeds individual experience. Rather than offering explanation, the works inhabit the uncertain terrain between witnessing and distance, using colour, repetition, symbolism, and personal narrative to consider how political violence is perceived, internalised, and remembered.

Panos Balomenos is a visual artist from Athens, Greece, who has lived and worked in Helsinki since 2003. He holds a BA in Painting from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, a BA in Sculpture from Städelschule in Frankfurt, and an MFA in Painting from the Academy of Fine Arts Helsinki.

‍Working primarily with watercolour painting and performance, Balomenos brings together personal narratives, historical events, and fiction to examine power relations, politics, and environmental questions. His watercolour works often unfold through extended series, with individual paintings accumulating multiple narrative, symbolic, and historical layers. Against the increasing digitisation of contemporary life, he approaches painting as a medium through which social criticism, reflection, and sustained forms of looking can continue to take place.

His work has been presented at institutions including Design Museum Helsinki, Vantaa Art Museum Artsi, Museum of Applied Arts Belgrade, SAW Gallery Ottawa, and SIC – Space for International Cooperation, Athens. He has participated in residency programmes including Triangle Arts Association, New York (2024), and Itinera Arte, Rio de Janeiro (2026). His series Malmological Observations(2025) was acquired by the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki.