Vegesent: What We Choose to See
In Veronika Kvitko’s work, a shipping tube becomes a road, a discarded garment takes on a different economic meaning, and a material that has already served its original purpose brings its own history with it. Working in Helsinki under the name Vegesent, she has developed a research-based conceptual practice in which questions of value, perception and our relationship with other forms of life take shape through simple objects and pared-back forms.
Her current practice grew out of years spent in graphic design and the applied arts. She describes the move as a shift in the way she works with visual language. Rather than communicating an existing message, she began using material and form to investigate questions for herself. In conversation with AH Magazine, she reflects on that development, the changing role of beauty in her work, her use of discarded materials and the boundary between what is in front of us and what we actually register.
Growing up on a farm appears in your biography as the starting point for your artistic enquiry. Beyond what your biography can capture, what would you like readers to understand about the person and artist behind the name Vegesent?
My practice begins with a personal experience that became a question.
What I would like readers to understand is that Vegesent is not a persona separate from me, but the result of years of personal and professional development.
Growing up on a farm gave me an early experience of animal agriculture as an ordinary social practice. Around twenty years ago, I began consciously researching the relationship between animals, animal agriculture and the social systems that make particular ways of treating other forms of life seem normal or acceptable. That research gradually led me, around eight years ago, to adopt veganism as a personal moral stance. Veganism is important to how I live, but it is not the starting point or purpose of my art practice.
My contemporary art practice began only three years ago. Before that, I worked professionally in the applied arts, primarily as a graphic designer, and spent many years developing ways to translate information, ideas and complex messages into visual form. Moving into conceptual contemporary art was therefore not a complete change of direction, but a shift in how I wanted to use those skills. Instead of communicating an existing message, I began using visual and material language to investigate questions myself.
My practice is research-based rather than activist.
I begin with objective realities, including scientific data and research, and examine how these realities are interpreted through social structures, systems of knowledge, value and power. I am interested in how we construct our understanding of life and our relationships with other forms of life. My work does not aim to tell the viewer what to think. It creates a physical and perceptual situation in which the subject can be encountered and considered from different perspectives.
Today, my practice draws on biopolitics and the critique of anthropocentrism, examining how life becomes a category of value and power and which forms of life are given consideration within the structures we build.
So, behind the name Vegesent is not only the person who grew up on a farm, but also someone who has spent many years questioning the systems she inherited, researching how they operate and developing the tools to examine them through art.
When you look back at the Earth series and your more recent work, which often uses objects that carry histories of their own, what has changed in how you think about beauty and materials?
Looking back at the Earth series, I see it as a transitional work in my development as an artist. It was my first attempt to enter the field of contemporary art, while my understanding of art was still strongly shaped by eight years of classical training at an aesthetic school and by my background in the applied arts. I had a strong grasp of composition, visual quality and how to create something aesthetically compelling, but I had not yet fully understood the difference between classical, decorative and contemporary art.
The Earth series developed somewhere between conceptual and decorative art. I was still interested in beauty and in creating objects that could exist within an interior, but I was also beginning to question what an artwork could be and what role materials could play. With my later work, I moved increasingly away from decorative art and began experimenting more freely with objects, forms and materials that are not bound by the conventions of painting or classical representation.
This also changed how I think about beauty. I still value beauty, craftsmanship and visual quality, and my classical training remains an important strength in my practice. But beauty is no longer the primary goal. I am much more interested in what lies behind the visual experience and what the material itself can communicate.
The choice of material has therefore become part of the conceptual structure of my work. I think about where a material comes from, what history it carries, what it has been used for and what its ecological implications are. Even within the Earth series, my understanding of this developed over time. The first versions used more conventional materials, while I later moved towards completely biodegradable materials because doing so supported the conceptual logic of the series.
So I would say that my relationship with beauty has not disappeared, but it has changed. Earlier, beauty could be the main point of departure. Now it is one element within a larger relationship between material, meaning, form and perception.
The work can still be beautiful, but I want the beauty to lead somewhere beyond itself.
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Earth series, Vegesent
Unwrapped brings together discarded bags, plexiglass and acrylic paint. When you reuse materials like these, how does that change the responsibility you feel in working with them, and what remains unchanged?
Nowadays, I try to work as much as possible with reclaimed or biodegradable materials. By ‘reclaimed’, I mean materials that have already served their practical or social function, like plexiglass offcuts or second-hand acrylic paints that are no longer needed elsewhere.
When possible, I use biodegradable paints and materials as well. This connects directly to the critique of anthropocentrism at the heart of my practice. I feel a strong responsibility for what enters my artistic process and what it leaves behind. At the same time, I don't treat material responsibility as a reason to compromise on the quality of the artwork.
Different materials have different technical properties. When I am working with plexiglass, for example, acrylic paint is sometimes the only way to achieve the result I want, and that paint is reclaimed too.
High quality remains important to me. What changes for me with reclaimed materials is the starting point. If a material has already been produced and used, I'm not having new materials produced just to make art. That material's previous life becomes part of the work. So my responsibility is not simply to use recycled materials, but to think critically about the whole process: what is used, what I do with it and what remains afterwards.
Unwrapped; Concept: Transparency does not produce visibility. Unwrapped; Concept: Transparency does not produce visibility. Unwrapped; Concept: Transparency does not produce visibility.
Unwrapped, Vegesent
With Portal, the viewer inserts a coin and becomes part of the work. What role did you want the audience to play, and how do you judge whether the work has fulfilled its purpose?
With Portal, I want the viewer to become part of the work, rather than just observe it. The piece is accompanied by a poem, which I perform, and people can use a coin I provide or their own. This simple act turns the use of an everyday object into an artistic and ethical action.
The money goes to causes that support animals, so participation has a physical consequence beyond the artwork itself. For me, the work operates on multiple levels: as a visual and conceptual piece, as a performance, as an invitation to participate and as a way of redirecting small actions towards tangible support for animals.
I don't measure its success by whether every viewer reaches the same conclusion. I'm more interested in whether it creates a moment of awareness in which someone considers what their small action means.
Eyes distils research on animal sentience into two simple circles. Why did the eye become the right form for this work, and where do you see the limits of that symbol?
For me, the eye became the right form because it sits at the intersection of perception, recognition and our assumptions about consciousness. In human experience, the eyes are often where we first look when we encounter another individual. We read them as a sign of awareness and inner life, and we use that visual connection to decide, often unconsciously, whether another being is like us.
This becomes particularly interesting when we look at other species. The more an animal’s eyes resemble our own, the more easily we tend to recognise it as conscious and emotionally present. We may feel a strong connection when looking into the eyes of a horse, for example, but be much less inclined to make the same assumption about a crab or another animal whose eyes are very different from ours. With beings whose forms of perception are even further removed from our own, our tendency to assume consciousness can become weaker still.
That is the tension I wanted to explore in Eyes. The work reduces the eye to two simple circles, using very little visual information to ask how little we need before we begin to recognise another conscious being. The research behind the work concerns animal sentience and the scientific evidence that many non-human animals possess neurological structures associated with conscious experience. The piece then shifts the question from the biological reality itself to our human perception of that reality.
The limitation of the eye as a symbol is precisely that it is not scientific evidence of consciousness. An eye can make us feel that another being is conscious, but consciousness does not depend on whether an organism has eyes that look familiar to us or even whether it has eyes at all. The symbol therefore exposes a human bias: we tend to recognise consciousness more readily when another being resembles us.
The silver tube in Road has a glittering, visually seductive surface. What did that choice allow you to explore, and what risks did it carry?
For me, Road is primarily about duality: the duality of reality and imagination, but also the duality of human perception and where we choose to direct our attention.
The work consists of two tubes and two frames, creating two parallel versions of the same road. The shipping tube is important because its original function is already connected to the idea of a journey. It is packaging designed to carry something from one place to another, so it becomes a metaphor for transport and movement within the work.
One road is the imagined one, romanticised and visually seductive. The other refers to the actual route from production facilities to slaughterhouses, a reality that exists but is largely absent from our everyday attention. I was interested in how these two realities can exist simultaneously, yet our perception gives them completely different levels of visibility.
The beauty of the silver version was therefore also a risk. It could become too beautiful and too poetic, and lead the work towards romantic imagery rather than the tension I wanted to examine. But that risk is connected to the subject itself. The seductive version reflects how easily our attention can be drawn towards an imagined reality while another reality remains outside our field of attention.
So I think the work is less about representing two roads than about making that split in perception visible.
A small tag reading ‘chick’ in Negative Value resembles a product label. How did that detail come about?
The small ‘chick’ label emerged during the development of the work and through my dialogue with the curator and art critic Julia Sysalova (AICA). I wanted to push the connection between the subject of my research and the visual language of the object further.
My research here is about how economic logic shapes perception and determines which forms of life acquire value and which become surplus. Animal agriculture is the lens through which I examine that structure. One of the challenges in my practice is finding a way to make that relationship visible without simply representing an animal. I prefer to work with simple objects, symbols and metaphors that can make the structure itself perceptible.
The label was an attempt to do that. The word ‘chick’ functions like a product label, so a living being is identified through the same kind of visual language we use to identify something within a system of production and exchange. It also connects to the T-shirt itself, which is already a familiar object with an assigned monetary value.
That is important because the T-shirt is not an arbitrary material. It was originally worth €50, but it has been discarded. I use that monetary reference to draw a comparison with a different kind of economic calculation: what happens when keeping a sentient being alive costs more than its life is considered to be worth within a production system.
From the Earth series to her current work, Veronika Kvitko has given increasing weight to the previous life of a material and to the meaning an object already carries. Her answers also show that she now approaches her practice differently: beauty is no longer the starting point, and the history and implications of her materials help shape the work’s conceptual structure. Form, material and the viewer’s response become part of a single process.
