“Romantic Measures”, University of Applied Arts Vienna, 2018

Photos by Martina Lajczak

“Romantic Measures” emerged from a collaboration between Xenia Ostrovskaya and the Empirical Visual Aesthetics (EVA) Lab at the University of Vienna as part of the Illuhub project. The partnership explored how visual manipulation affects viewers’ interpretation of images, echoing the artist’s own practice of painting over old postcards to create new narratives from historical material.

For this project, Ostrovskaya altered postcards from both the Nazi era, concealing their original contexts to construct unfamiliar worlds. Viewers first encountered the transformed images, then received clues revealing their true origins. The EVA Lab used the installation to examine how artistic intention is perceived and how emotional communication in art aligns with one´s experience, extending a research line that included studies presented at the 57th Venice Biennale.