Barbara Kruger: Untitled (Another Again)
Barbara Kruger’s work has long been an uncompromising analysis of the intersection between language and power. Emerging from a background in design and conceptual art, she has shaped a distinct visual language which fuses the urgency of mass communication with a radical critique of contemporary politics and consumerist ideology. For decades her stark declarative texts—often in white Futura Bold against red or black backgrounds—have inhabited the parts of public infrastructure usually reserved for advertisements, subverting the systems they mimic. With her latest work for the Ukrainian Railways, Kruger extends this engagement with public space to a moving temporal dimension and transforms an Intercity train into a site of poetic and political resonance.
In this unprecedented project Kruger applies her iconic typo-graphic intervention to the surface of a Ukrainian Intercity train, with the railways having become an essential artery for refuge and survival. Since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion, it has been the Intercity train that has carried civilians to safety, brought families together, transported soldiers to and away from the front-lines, and delivered vital humanitarian aid. In this way, the Intercity train is not only a means of transit but a crucial lifeline. In her decision to inscribe poetry onto its surfaces, Kruger draws a direct lineage to early avant-garde strategies of public messaging — particularly to Vasyl Yermilov and his agit-trains of the 1920s which bore revo-lutionary slogans and avant-garde imagery as they traversed a war-torn landscape. In both cases the train becomes a vessel of both ideological and physical movement carrying messages that seek to transform as they travel.
Kruger’s newly commissioned artwork, Untitled (Another Again) carries a poem of relentless rhythm and stark oppositions, echoing the mechanical constancy of the railway itself:
ANOTHER DAY ANOTHER NIGHT ANOTHER DARKNESS ANOTHER LIGHT ANOTHER KISS ANOTHER FIGHT ANOTHER LOSS ANOTHER WIN ANOTHER WISH ANOTHER SIN ANOTHER SMILE ANOTHER TEAR ANOTHER HOPE ANOTHER FEAR ANOTHER LOVE ANOTHER YEAR ANOTHER STRIFE ANOTHER LIFE
Through stark repetition Kruger’s words become an incantation mirroring the relentless motion of the Ukrainian Railway. The poem’s binary structure—day and night, loss and win, love and fear—captures the brutal simultaneity of war where the everyday persists in uneasy proximity to violent conflict. The Intercity train a symbol of both escape and return amplifies the poem’s dualities: movement and stasis, despair and endurance, departure and arrival. As the train speeds forward, these words pulse across its surface their meaning accumulating and shifting with every passing station.
The sonic qualities of the train itself—the metallic clatter of wheels the deep hum of acceleration the ceaseless repetition of motion—merge with the rhythmic insistence of Kruger’s text. The poem does not merely describe but enacts the reality of war: a relent-less forward march an ever—repeating cycle of grief and resilience. With the movement of the train inextricably linked to the forward march of history, Untitled (Another Again) transforms individual experiences into a collective statement, turning personal grief into national testimony.
Kruger’s intervention on a Ukrainian Intercity train is an act of solidarity and a recognition of both the suffering and defiant perse-verance of those who board these carriages daily. The Ukrainian railway system—long a subject of revolutionary imagination—now functions as a site of both survival and cultural resistance.
In this moment of profound crisis, Untitled (Another Again) serves as a reminder that artworks—when placed with intent—can function not only as critique but as lifeline, as a witness, as a force. In over-laying the physicality of the Ukrainian Railway with poetic urgency, Kruger transforms transit into testimony, ensuring that as these Intercity trains cross the country, they communicate the weight of war and the persistence of life in Ukraine.
Maria Isserlis, Curator
Barbara Kruger (*1945, Newark, NJ) lives and works in Los Angeles and New York. In June her next solo show will open at the Guggenheim, Bilbao. Further solo shows include ARoS Art Museum, Aarhus (2024), the Serpentine Galleries, London (2024), Museum of Modern Art, New York (2022), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2022), Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2022), The Art Institute of Chicago (2021), AMOREPACIFIC Museum of Art, Seoul (2019), National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (2016), High Line Art, New York (2016), Modern Art Oxford (2014), Kunsthaus Bregenz (2013), Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2011), Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2010), Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow (2005), Palazzo delle Papesse, Siena (2002), South London Gallery (2001), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2000), Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1999), Kunsthalle Basel (1984) and Institute of Contemporary Arts – ICA London (1983). Group shows include Langen Foundation, Neuss (2025), Kunsthalle St. Gallen (2024), The Broad, Los Angeles (2023), La Biennale di Venezia (2022), Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (2021), Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2018), V-A-C Foundation, Palazzo delle Zattere, Venice (2017), Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2014), Biennale of Sydney (2014), Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2013), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2010), Museum of Modern Art, New York (2010, 2009, 2007), Palazzo Grassi, Venice (2006), Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2004), Tate Liverpool (2002), Centre Pompidou, Paris (1989, 1987) and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1987).
