In Kyiv, Simone Post unfolds a work that, at first glance, looks like an enchanted set. But very quickly, behind the obvious visual pleasure, something shifts. In Still Joy — From Ukraine into the World, the Dutch artist’s installation turns the space into a temporary, almost unreal construction made of candy, sugary materials, and familiar objects reinvented like fragments of childhood memory. The place becomes a kind of inhabited dream, both welcoming and unstable.
What matters in Simone Post’s work is not only the immediate seduction of the material. It is her way of pushing things toward memory. Sugar, marshmallow, sour wafer, candy chains, and everyday forms are not used here to create a simple playful effect. They compose a world suspended between home, recollection, and fiction. We think we recognize something, but we can never quite say what it is.
A Childhood Imaginary
Post’s work revives a childlike sense of joy, but without turning it into something naive. The chandeliers, decorative frames, and domestic images made of sweets evoke an interior rebuilt from emotional traces, as if the past had been rewritten with tender, perishable materials. The whole thing first seduces through softness, then reveals its real nature: a fragile beauty, meant to change, unravel, and melt.
That is where the installation finds its strength. By choosing unstable materials, the artist reminds us that images of happiness are never eternal. They are often brief, dependent on context, gaze, and timing. In Simone Post’s work, joy is never a fixed state. It is an apparition.
Architecture of Illusion
The installation also acts as an intervention in space. It does not simply occupy it; it changes the way we read it. It imposes an artificial, almost theatrical domesticity that makes us hesitate between intimacy and artifice, between the familiar and the impossible. The visitor enters a place that seems inhabited, yet remains deeply fictional.
This tension between set design and vulnerability is at the heart of the project. Everything in this structure suggests celebration or abundance, but everything also signals its coming disappearance. Post does not build a monument. She builds a short duration, intensified by the awareness of its end. That is what makes her work so sensitive: it never hides the precariousness of what it shows.
A Joy That Holds
Within the context of Still Joy, this installation takes on a particular meaning. The exhibition examines joy as a force of survival, but also as an almost political gesture in the face of war, loss, and displacement. Simone Post brings something more intimate, more light in appearance, yet made vulnerable by the material itself.
Her work ultimately says this: joy is not only a feeling. It can also be a construction, a staged form, a way of holding together memory, desire, and fragility. In Kyiv, that idea resonates strongly. Beauty does not appear there as a luxury, but as a soft form of resistance.
What Her Work Tells Us
In Simone Post’s work, the more tender the universe seems, the more clearly the quiet violence of time begins to appear. Sugar attracts and then breaks down; the home protects and then turns into illusion; childhood seems light, but it already carries loss within it. This ambivalence gives her work its real depth.
It is not just about sweetness. It is about the difficulty of preserving what is sweet. And in a Ukrainian context marked by urgency, that fragility becomes a language of its own.
Grégory Herpe
Leave a comment