Under The Table

Under the Table is a participatory installation and performance inspired by Puuffin’s childhood memory of hiding under the table in her Ukrainian home and drawing on the wallpaper. The work features a whimsical wooden house with a single wallpapered wall, imitating a living room, where visitors are invited to draw or write memories of their childhood homes. Each day, four singers perform a short choral piece composed from these contributions, turning personal memories into a living, evolving symphony. The project transforms a private, nostalgic moment into a shared act of creativity and remembrance, exploring themes of belonging, displacement, and resilience.

About the artist
Karina Puuffin’s (1997, Ukraine) work occupies a mischievous space between critique and celebration. She likes to transform painting into a spatial, performative act: one that doesn’t sit politely on the wall but spills, stretches, and leans into the viewer’s space. Her work stems from a personal and political impulse to unframe art—literally and ideologically. Beneath its childlike clarity and comics stylisation lies a sharp interrogation of systems: artistic, institutional, and ideological. Her practice questions who gets to define what art is, how it should behave, and where it belongs. She tries to reclaim messiness, softness, and exaggeration as modes of resistance, where clumsiness is intentional, joy is a strategy, and painting is something to walk into, question, and laugh with.

Puuffin graduated from Minerva Art Academy in Groningen with exceptional grades in 2020. She was part of various exhibitions in the Netherlands such as Best of Graduates in Gallery Ron Mandos (Amsterdam), Museum EICAS (Deventer) and Prospects (ART Rotterdam, Ahoy). She also received a Mondriaan Artist Start Grant in 2023.

This work is part of the MOMO X Amarte Open Call 2026. Read more.