From Word to Noise - Katja Butorina’s Pusto at Arrival Gallery

Written By: Molly Peck

In January 2026, Just Arrived at Arrival Gallery brought together a group of international artists whose practices engage with perception, mediation, and contemporary forms of experience. Among them, Katja Butorina presented Pusto: Resonant Echo (2022), an audiovisual installation that crystallizes her ongoing investigation into sound, language, and non-human modes of communication. The exhibition itself was shaped by a strong sense of collective presence and exchange - as the organizers noted, it became not only a display of works but a space for conversations, connections, and shared perceptual moments that extended beyond the duration of the show.

Katja Butorina, born in Togliatti and raised in Saint Petersburg, and based in London since 2022, works at the intersection of art, research, and design. Her practice explores communication beyond a strictly human-centered framework, focusing instead on embodied, sensory, and more-than-human forms of interaction. Using video, sound, data visualization, and installation, she constructs environments in which perception is not given in advance but emerges through interaction, attention, and technological mediation.

Pusto: Resonant Echo is grounded in a paradoxical engagement with emptiness. As Butorina suggests, emptiness can be articulated verbally, but it can also be rendered as a concrete visual image - one that remains metaphorical rather than representational. The work approaches absence not as a void but as something that can be actively shaped and manipulated. This process is framed as a kind of ritual - an act of self-cleansing, of stripping away the extraneous in order to make perceptible what usually remains invisible.

At the conceptual core of the project lies the phenomenon of “phantom words,” identified by the psychologist Diana Deutsch. Her research into auditory perception demonstrates how repeated fragments of speech can generate illusory words and meanings that are not actually present in the signal. Butorina translates this phenomenon into an artistic language. The repeated utterance of the Russian word “pusto” (“empty”) gradually loses its semantic function, dissolving into pure sound. At the same time, the listener begins to perceive phantom words - linguistic apparitions shaped by memory, expectation, and belief.

This oscillation between meaning and its dissolution is central to the installation. Repetition, here, functions not only as a perceptual mechanism but also as a ritual structure - it focuses attention, suspends habitual interpretation, and opens a space in which new associations can emerge. Speech is treated as a material gesture, its phonographic structure becoming a form of sound architecture that occupies and reshapes space. The installation thus operates as an acoustic environment in which language is no longer a transparent medium of communication but a textured, spatial, and unstable phenomenon.

Illusions within Pusto: Resonant Echo are not fixed images but dynamic, unstable formations. They produce a sense of multiplicity, erode clear boundaries, and remain open to interpretation. Rather than guiding the viewer toward a single meaning, the work invites a process of searching - of navigating between perception and projection. In this sense, the installation aligns with Butorina’s broader interest in data traces and alternative modes of information exchange, where meaning is not transmitted but co-produced.

The experiential dimension of the work is crucial. Perception unfolds through listening, and attention gradually shifts from the external attributes of the exhibition space to internal sensations. The audiovisual sequence induces a state that approaches meditation - a slowed, attentive mode of engagement in which the distinction between signal and interpretation becomes increasingly fluid. The viewer-listener is not positioned outside the work but is implicated in its unfolding, becoming part of the perceptual system it generates.

Within the context of Just Arrived, Butorina’s installation contributed a particularly introspective and process-oriented dimension. While the exhibition as a whole emphasized movement, arrival, and the convergence of artistic practices, Pusto: Resonant Echo redirected this dynamic inward - toward the micro-processes of perception itself. It foregrounded the instability of meaning, the materiality of language, and the role of repetition as both a technological and ritual form.

Her participation in the exhibition further consolidates her position as an artist working across disciplinary and conceptual boundaries. By combining research into auditory perception with immersive audiovisual environments and ritualized structures of repetition, Katja Butorina continues to develop a practice that is both analytically precise and sensorially immersive. Her work contributes to ongoing discussions on how technology reshapes perception, how language can be experienced as matter, and how absence - far from being empty - can become a site of intensified experience.

Photo Credit: Katja Butorina