The versatile chair cover
Krakow, Poland, 2023
The interaction with furniture and architectural space, namely the creation of "a versatile chair cover", became a new focus for the artist and designer Yasya Khomenko.
For her first compressed chair cover, which was made in April 2023, Yasia applied the principle of unification to create a versatile object that would be able to combine, in this case, completely random chairs into one visual subject group. Using her traditional compression technology, which is dominated by its sculptural texture, the artist deliberately hid under it those flaws that could distract attention from the form of the object - various defects, replaced or broken parts, kitschy design.. Thus, the cover, created according to the maximum measurements of the chairs existing on the market, turns each object into a piece of art, in fact transforming it from an interior object into a frame for a new shape. Because the chair as such is no longer important, it only serves as a stretcher for the canvas.
Japanese Palace, Dresden, Germany, 2023
In August 2023, as part of a special international scholarship at the SKD Museum, Yasia Khomenko cooperated with product designer Nikita Bukoros to expand technological research, as the facilities and support of the Japanese Palace (SKD Museum) were ideal for physical experiments. This circumstance greatly influenced the result, as the corresponding production is a very painful issue for a temporarily displaced artist.
Through this collaboration, they have explored a variety of shrinkable materials that enable the immediate formation of shapes directly onto objects. Their final work was a live performance of direct compression of a hypertrophied enlarged cover on a chair under the influence of temperature. Thus, the demonstration of the process became equally important as the final object. Nikita also created a video visualization of the adaptation of the thermally compressed cover on various types and designs of chairs, including spliced mutants of folk crafts that have become an integral part of DIY upcycling. So in this way, the versatile chair cover also becomes an object of sustainability, since the chair frame can even be made from garbage. This new chair uniform equates the most expensive chair with the most trashy equivalent, proclaiming a system of equality and vanishing social and economic classes.
Fashion Revolution, Berlin, Germany, 2024
In April 2024, as part of the Fashion Revolution anniversary, Yasia Khomenko was invited to engage with the urban environment through an installation. Over the course of one month in Berlin, she collected broken chairs found across the city and covered them with a versatile textile cover, unifying them and symbolically placing all “classes” on equal ground.
Plantage Dok, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, 2025
In March 2025, during the Plantage Dok residency, Yaroslava developed a versatile chair cover into versatile-versatile textile cover conceived as both a functional object and a sculptural surface. The work operates simultaneously as a flat piece (when stretched over planar structures such as a painting stretcher) and as a skin for three-dimensional objects. Through this duality, the artist proposes a dialogue between artistic gesture and functional design, inviting the viewer to reconsider the boundaries between artwork and utilitarian form.
In this segment of the experiment, cartography becomes a key graphic language because it is visually readable in both cases—flat and voluminous—subordinating itself each time to a different object, which it covers.
The versatile cover
160 x 160 cm
upcycled T-shirts, adhesive woven interlining, elastic cord, plastic cord stopper