Reset as Maintenance Practice I
This work explores the intersection of memory, absence, ritual, and sensory experience. Pages holding memories were saturated with fragrance oils, page by page, in order to dissolve their content; not with the aim of erasing memory, but to create a new layer of experience around it.
When the notebooks are revisited, the past they contain is activated in the present. By pairing this encounter with fragrance and the conscious act of release, a new association is formed. Fragrance is as crucial as it is elusive: it shapes the ritual of dissolution and the temporal quality of the gesture, even though its presence is fleeting. Since smell is closely linked to the brain’s emotional and memory systems, it has a particular capacity to shape how an experience is felt.
The body of the work moves from density to openness: the pages cluster at the centre, gradually thinning toward the edges, suggesting the fading and dispersal of stored experience. It is less about forgetting than about transformation: a study on how memory can be consciously recontextualised and made to coexist with the present. The written past becomes inseparable from the sensory ritual that now surrounds it.
------------Viktoria Kurnicki (b. Germany) is a visual artist exploring estrangement and cultural liminality, shaped by her experience as a child of Polish immigrants. Her work reveals fragile gestures and emotional undercurrents within precise, orderly structures and muted materials, exploring the tension between clarity and ambiguity and exposing subtle vulnerabilities. She lives and works in Milan and studied Fine Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts, Dresden, before completing an M.A. in Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies at NABA, Milan. Her work has been shown internationally in solo exhibitions including uncertainties (Hannover, 2021) and Poco Trasparente (Milan, 2024), and in group shows such as SETTING (Milan, 2025) and U.F.F.U. (Tokyo, 2025). Kurnicki has received scholarships from Erasmus+, Cusanuswerk, and the Diocese Rottenburg-Stuttgart, and participated in VIR Viafarini-In-Residence, Milan (2023–24).
@viktoriakurnicki