The Bear’s Den
Kostis Stafylakis
Sunday
13.09.2026
16:00–16:45
Betonhalle
Credit: Kostis Stafylakis
In his performative surgery, Stafylakis digs into the artificial guts of bear-suited performers to retrieve objects like vintage USSR-era and pre-Soviet Russian toys.
Among these are Bogorodsk wooden miniatures depicting bears engaged in various labor scenarios. These artifacts expose layers of the "bear vernacular" - the heavy cultural burden of a symbol that spans from Romani bear tamers and Adidas - wearing memes to gay bear subcultures, the Western trope of the "Russian Bear," the "Putin riding a bear" meme, and the Berlin coat of arms.
When Kostis Stafylakis began searching for online articles and news regarding the latest escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian war, his social media feeds became algorithmically flooded with photos, reels, and shorts of bears interacting with Russian citizens. These streams featured animal tamers sharing meals with bears, Russian influencers posing in intimate embraces with them, and burly bodybuilders executing workouts alongside the animals.
This wave of memetic content predated the rise of AI-generated "slop" and its specific subgenre of human-animal role reversals. Social media accounts like Look at this Russian and Squatting Slavs in Tracksuits were skyrocketing in popularity. Echoing the formula of the iconic Life of Boris YouTube channel, Look at this Russian peaked in virality around 2023, amassing a massive archive of user-generated footage that framed contemporary Russian life as inherently surreal, absurd, and raw.
Following an extended period of intense doomscrolling through this material, Stafylakis channeled the imagery into a series of solo exhibitions titled GZPRM GOPNIK. These multimedia installations sought to rework the viral, stereotypical, and exoticized perceptions of Slavic identity, layering them with an unsettling, fetishistic twist. Eventually, Stafylakis's interest in the memes waned, yet the bears persisted. Clips of human-bear interactions continued to haunt his feed, refusing to let go.
In the summer of 2024, while exhibiting his GZPRM GOPNIK material on the Greek island of Lesbos, he felt a sudden urge to dissect the algorithmic bear—to peer into its digital guts and uncover what lay inside. Just as the algorithm was analyzing him, he resolved to analyze it back.