"untitled (The holy place is never empty)"

Cologne Cathedral

Animals are recurring motifs in Anna Jermolaewa’s oeuvre. However, her precise gaze is less focused on the symbolic parallel behaviour of animal and human natures than on everyday and specific situations in which humans and animals coexist. In the photographs shown here, doves occupy an empty niche on the richly decorated façade of Cologne Cathedral as well as on a Buddhist temple in Burma. The addition to the works’ title (The holy place is never empty) could be read as a laconic commentary about the horror vacui of the culture of ornamentation in the Gothic tradition of sacred Christian architecture, in which elaborate series of sculptures were intended to disseminate knowledge of canonized religious teachings. Within this, doves famously play a leading role – but they are also ever-present companions of the goings-on in European and Asian cities. Jermolaewa’s snapshots therefore become a tongue-in-cheek reflection on the relationship between humans and birds both in urban spaces and in the iconography of major world religions.
(Krzysztof Kościuczuk, 2015)

Anna Jermolaewa's work is characterized by a critical reflection of existing political structures of power and supremacy. This is also what informs Untitled(The holy placeis never empty), in which the artist overwrites the pictorial symbolism and, with it, the authority of pictureinterpretation of the Catholic church, using its own myths of revelation against it. Instead of the statue of a saint, there are no less than two doves, or "Holy Spirits," that appear in the portal of a Gothic church, giving rise to some reasonable doubt about traditional doctrines of "unity" and "Trinity".
(from: Ludwig Wittgenstein. Photographie as Analytical Practies, Leopoldmuseum Vienna, 2021)