I’m sitting on a chair — comfortable, padded, designed for long hours of work. It does its job so well I barely notice it, as I let my mind drift toward Kate Vagurina’s unsettling creations. Thinking about her work reminds me of those kitchen corner sets in post-Soviet apartments. Compact, practical, designed to save space — but in reality? A trap. They crammed families into tight angles, forced knees to bump, elbows to clash. Supposedly “comfortable,” they became sites of subtle discomfort — both physical and emotional. And yet, they remain etched in memory, perhaps because they tried to offer more than they could give.
Kate Vagurina’s latest series, What does it mean to be uncomfortable, strikes a similar nerve. It confronts the idea of comfort, exposing its contradictions and transforming it into an artistic inquiry. Vagurina’s work operates at the intersection of memory, displacement, and materiality. While they may resemble furniture, her objects are anything but functional. Instead, they exist as conceptual explorations of comfort and its limits — artefacts that provoke more questions than answers. They reflect her personal experiences, including her forced relocation from Russia to Belgrade due to political circumstances, and the dissonance between stability and uprootedness.
Her project envisions furniture and everyday objects as active participants in a complex dialogue rather than mere conveniences. Chairs, tables, and other domestic items embody tension: they resist, provoke, and remind us that comfort is never truly neutral. They force viewers to navigate a space where form is stripped of function, leaving behind only questions.
Vagurina’s work stands alongside a lineage of artists who have interrogated the familiar to unsettling effect. Meret Oppenheim’s fur-covered teacup transformed a symbol of daily ritual into something grotesque, challenging our expectations of utility and familiarity. There is a quiet surrealism in the What does it mean to be uncomfortable: the creations are divorced from their expected roles and made strange, yet they never lose their connection to our everyday lives.
Erwin Wurm’s One Minute Sculptures also come to mind, where bodies are asked to interact with furniture in absurd ways — becoming part of the object rather than its master. Yet Vagurina’s work leans less on humor and more on unease.
Vagurina’s pieces are haunted by the weight of memory, displacement, and identity. They are surreal not just in form, but in the questions they force us to ask about ourselves and our surroundings.
At What’s Next? Exhibition, Vagurina presented a list of works from The (Un)Forgotten Objects series. These digital sculptures blurred the line between artefact and memory, forming semi-abstract furniture. The curator describes them as “images of the dear objects we left behind in our old lives.”
The exhibition invited viewers to project their own narratives onto the pieces: what have you left behind? These objects, deliberately non-functional, seemed to mourn their lost purpose while embodying the unresolved trauma of displacement. Like markers on a path to nowhere, they reflected a future haunted by a past that can never fully be reclaimed.
Vagurina’s artworks asked not just practical questions — what does it mean to sit, to rest? — but existential ones. How do we carry the intangible weight of the things we’ve lost? They remind us that comfort — and, thankfully, discomfort — is never static. It shifts, resists, challenges, and ultimately has an end. Perhaps comfort is less about softness and more about understanding. And perhaps discomfort, in all its strange, spiky beauty, has more to teach us than we’d like to admit.
