Two years ago, three people came together to think about the dog. A dog. Dogs. How they enter our lives, and why, on what grounds we choose to follow them, let them enter our kitchens, beds, artist studios. How they leave. And all the hair in-between our teeth, in our meals, the dead birds, ties and knots in the cupboards.

I lick the drain your hair is stuck in is a repository of residues assembled by Stanislava Ovchinnikova with Maria Batchenko, Kush Badhwar, and dog Los’. The exhibition recollects a multi-year and multi-species working process in which conversations, domestic spaces, found objects and cityscapes were inverted, enlarged, burrowed into, and made illegible.

The resulting artworks explore how interconnected the human and canine worlds can become. In the video documentation of the performance The Animal That Therefore You Made Me (Follow), Stanislava Ovchinnikova appropriates a dog’s physicality while moving through the center of Helsinki. The artist sees the animal’s unsettled, constantly shifting position situated between numerous worlds—domestic and urban, human and more-than-human—as kin to the expansive but fragmented mental state of a displaced person such as herself, wondering whether more political freedom could be found in dogness. A neighboring video work by the artist and urbanist Kush Badhwar widens the view from one body to many by reflecting on the public display of a population count: the bodies that represent it and those hidden behind the digits.

Elsewhere in the exhibition, the traces of human-canine relationships take center stage. Leash-based works, created in conversation with dog trainer Maria Batchenko, ask what the tools and materials that mediate cross-species bonds might reveal about their character: restrictive, safeguarding, freeing. A similar ambivalence is carried even further into the part of the space that, taken over by Stanislava Ovchinnikova, will function as a working studio throughout the exhibition’s opening hours.

This exhibition is supported by the Kone Foundation.

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Stanislava Ovchinnikova is an artist and curator working with photography, performance, and writing to examine how (memories of) interpersonal, institutional, and structural violence shape our relationships with one another and the spaces that we inhabit. She held solo exhibitions at Turun Taiteen Talo (FI) and PostPlay Lab (UA) and partook in group exhibitions at the Amos Rex Museum, Pori Art Museum, Alkovi Galleria, and Titanik Galleria (FI). She was an artist-in-residence at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IE), New Performance Turku (FI), and Sodas 2123 (LT) among others, and received support from numerous European foundations including Koneen Säätiö, Amos Anderson Fond, German Library Association, and the House of Europe. In 2024, she convened an interdisciplinary artistic collective Bark!, which approaches human-canine relationships as sites of artistic, social, and spatial inquiry.

Maria Batchenko 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 works across filmmaking, artistic and urban research as ways of being with ideas and places over time. He has been exploring the gradual making of counter-narrative around rapid and drastic changes in uses of water and land around urban peripheries. Badhwar’s work has screened or exhibited across university campuses, in exhibition, festival and other social contexts. These include Addis Video Art Festival, the Flaherty Seminar, Videobrasil, Berlinale, Chicago Architecture Biennial, Sharjah Architecture Triennial and, increasingly, through online platforms including e-flux and Cinelogue. He has undertaken residencies at Sarai in Delhi, G.A.S. Foundation, Lagos and his work has been undertaken through contexts such as Indian Foundation for the Arts’ Archival Fellowship, Pad.ma’s Fellowship for Experiments with Video Archives and Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen’s Fellowship Program for Art and Theory.

Los’ is a kind, large, and beautiful mongrel dog. His name translates from Ukrainian as Moose. Born in the Kyiv region in 2014, at the age of 1,5 months he was taken off the street and into the family of Stanislava Ovchinnikova. They have travelled extensively together. Accompanying Stanislava, Los’ was in residency at New Performance Turku (FI), Sodas 2123 (LT), Aark (FI), and Kristinestad artist residency (FI). Now, aged twelve and a half, Los’ likes to stay home, spend quiet time with loved ones, and sleep.