Lada Nakonechna. Personal Shield. 2011. Object (steel, wheels). 115 × 80 × 20 cm

Work description

The concept for this work was realized by Lada Nakonechna during a residency in Zurich, Switzerland. While walking through the city, the artist noticed low wooden fences that typically marked private property boundaries. She repurposed the fence element to create a “personal shield,” this time in metal and with notable upgrades—wheels and spikes.

Through this rethinking of a mundane urban element, she exposes the city’s segregated nature and its inhabitants’ desire to make it more exclusive, private, and guarded from “others.” Nakonechna scales this idea to the geopolitical level and the problem of segregation: how willing are Western Europeans to accept and understand their eastern neighbors? During the work’s creation, the artist also touched on the issue of labor value: producing the object in Switzerland proved too expensive, so it was more cost-effective to make the “shield” in Ukraine and ship it. 

At the same time, the fence’s wheels make it mobile—suggesting that boundaries and divisions are conditional and temporary. The spikes, placed around the perimeter, hint at protective gear used by special forces during the suppression of public uprisings and protests.