Our Story
Open app
The Subjektiv Story by Rob Alderson
On a cold Friday night in January 2023, Kateryna Serdiuk came home from work and opened her computer. For the next five hours, she wrote a huge presentation that set out her plan for a new artistic platform. One that would bring together artists, art lovers and experts. Encourage discovery, reflection and community. And help people better understand themselves, and connect more meaningfully with each other.
The name, Subjektiv, would come later. But the ideas that underpin the project were all there. “That Friday night, it all came together,” Kateryna remembers.
Kateryna, CEO & Co-Founder of Subjektiv
The threads Kateryna wove together that night had been percolating for some time. She’d been studying the art market and different online platforms. Talking to friends and colleagues about their art buying experiences. And observing trends around what people value in a post-Covid world.
But speaking to Kateryna, you realise the seeds of Subjektiv were planted many years ago. Growing up in the industrial city of Dnipro, Ukraine, in the 1990s, she didn’t have much exposure to art. But she did always show an interest in bringing people together, organising her kindergarten class to make castles in the snow, or encouraging her classmates to make a little book for Christmas. “It was absolutely crucial to me to be super inclusive,” she laughs. “Not a single person should be left out.”
Her grandmother remembers that even as a little girl, she was “preoccupied with how people should live together, how communities form, how we could be better as a society.” These questions continued as she got older, fusing with an interest in aesthetics, which she discovered while studying for her Master’s in Madrid. The course covered critical thinking, for which she read Kant and Hannah Arendt and she “fell in love” with their theories that linked sharper personal judgment, trained through aesthetics, with stronger civil societies.
She credits a 2018 trip to Japan for her own artistic awakening. “I was blown away by the whole aesthetics of the country,” she says. But there was one painting in particular – Sesshu Toyo’s delicate, ethereal, Haboku-Sansui, or Landscape with Broken Ink, that made a huge impression on her.
Sesshū Tōyō, Haboku-Sansui (Landscape with Broken Ink)
“It’s very intricate, and very tender,” she explains.
“You feel like suddenly, the world isn’t so tough any more. You don’t need to push through. You don’t need to be looking over your shoulder. Everything is gentle – the brushstroke is confident, but gentle. And it’s very free.”
She liked that the painting, which is at least 500 years old, gave up more or less detail, depending on what the viewer wants to see. “It doesn't push you. It talks to you without tension,” she says.
Back in London, where she worked in finance, she was intoxicated by the city’s cultural energy. At weekends she would organise trips with her friends to see new exhibitions, and they would gather afterwards to discuss their thoughts and feelings over food. “Those conversations would flow very fluidly, “ she remembers. “Not just about art, but history and economics.”
In February 2022, Kateryna attended a philosophy course back in Ukraine, about how beauty and aesthetics can save the world. She flew back to London energised again by these ideas. The next day, Russia invaded her home country. She threw herself into the war effort, taking a sabbatical to help Ukraine’s Ministry of Health procure vital medical supplies.
Once, on a visit back home, she woke up during a bombing raid to feel her flat shaking like there was an earthquake. But she also found something much more optimistic emerging in the war-torn streets – an uplifting level of hope.
“When you can die any day, it creates a very interesting sense of time, of urgency. It’s a banality to say, ‘Live every day like your last.’ But in Ukraine, you really feel it. It’s not a banality – every day you ask yourself, if today is my last day, what am I going to do? What is important?”
This intense existential pressure creates clarity, and catharsis. People made big changes to live their lives in more authentic ways. They changed careers and started new relationships. The war also unleashed a sense of joy, an appreciation for all the things that make life worth living. There was a flowering of creativity.
“Artistic life in Ukraine is booming. It’s just incredible – theatres are full, people sing in the streets. I’ve found so many amazing artists – many people who used to do something very different, but found their calling in art.”
Which led to that Friday night, and the founding of Subjektiv. The platform brings together three groups of people, all of whom serve and strengthen the community in different ways.
For artists, it’s a place to sell their pieces, but more than that, it lets them build a community, and engage with people who admire their work. They can give insights into their studios and their process, and host events for their followers.
For art lovers, it’s a place to discover work they love from artists they’d otherwise never come across. They can immerse themselves in a creative corner of the internet, and find out what they like in a warm and welcoming environment. It’s designed not to feel like a marketplace, but people can buy original works in a couple of clicks.
For experts, it’s a chance to help shape the artistic conversation, to champion artists they believe in and lower the barriers for people who often feel intimidated by the traditional gallery world. “People should be given a vocabulary to talk about art,” Kateryna explains. “Experts can spur the discussion, and inject the right level of knowledge.”
These participants add value in their own way, both to individual works of art, and Subjektiv as a whole. Kateryna breaks that down into what she calls “the three C’s.”
For the artists, it’s creativity. For the experts, critique. Most interestingly, for the buyers, it’s courage. “To buy something because it’s beautiful, not because it’s functional, it takes courage,” she explains.
That leap of faith is even more impressive when it’s a newer artist still forging their reputation. To reward these early supporters, the first person who buys an artwork gets a Cuor token, which gives them exclusive access to the artist’s events, and other perks.
At the heart of everything are the artworks themselves, the “cornerstone” of the platform. They can’t be deleted, Kateryna explains, and they’re treated like, “living creatures, so we track everything that happens to them.” That includes when it’s shown in public, who owns it, when it changes hands.
The ambition is that, “an artwork can discover its ideal owner.” Although art is bought and sold on the platform, it is far from your regular e-commerce website.
“If I need to buy a jacket, I approximately know what sort of jacket I want. But for art, I don’t know. I want to encounter it. The ideal discovery mode is when you stumble across something you like. It’s like when you meet people – somehow you understand you share something, and you become friends.”
The team have worked hard to create a world in which serendipity and happenstance bring you face-to-face with something that speaks to your soul. It doesn't feel transactional, and that extends after the purchase too.
Subjektiv landing page
“It’s not the buying process that people enjoy the most,” Kateryna explains. “They want to talk about their art. They want to share it. They want life around it. They want to see the artist and know his or her story, come to their studio, participate in some events.”
It’s about community. But that starts with the individual. How you act is based on what you believe. And what you believe is based on what you like, and what you don’t.
The Subjektiv team thinks art is the best “training ground” to help people understand themselves. More conscious individuals can then contribute to more caring societies. “This is why we are here,” the Subjektiv mission statement proclaims, “to help us clarify what we like, so we can see the world we want to live in.”
This becomes even more important, more urgent, as AI becomes ever-more powerful.
“Personally, I don’t want to live in a world where everything’s about artificial intelligence,” Kateryna says. “Of course certain things should be automated, but more than ever, we need creativity, subjectivity, playfulness.
“Ultimately, one thing AI cannot do is want. It can do an artwork, but it cannot decide to do an artwork. So the agency is with us. And the agency is exactly what we want to train, that’s the subjectivity. If you don’t know what you want, AI will not help you.
“It’s important to remember that the decision is with us. Because any social or political interaction is impossible if we forget that. We can only be a proper part of civil society if we have our agency.”
It’s a big, thrillingly ambitious vision that inspires and unites everyone who works on the project.
Kateryna’s co-founder, Rostyslav Borshch is Gen X, her lead designer, Serhii Filonenko, is Gen Z. “It’s so interesting to see how different generations look at it, and how we all find something different in it,” she says.
But they share an unshakeable belief that this matters, way beyond the artworld.
“I want people to engage in more thoughtful conversations with themselves, and with each other,” Kateryna says. I want them to reflect more, to engage more with their feelings.”
To that end, the platform doesn't have comments, it has reflections, where viewers are given a couple of prompts to get their thoughts whirring (not unlike the post-exhibition dinners Kateryna used to organise in London, where she’d ask her friends what they liked most from what they’d just seen).
But, as at those dinners, self-reflection should be shared with others. She’s a big believer in objective truth. Subjectivity is a route to that objective reality, not a replacement.
And dialogue is beautiful, even if it takes the form of disagreement. “People are different – we literally see different colours in the same artwork,” she laughs. “But we can still discuss that.”
Katerya too felt that calling, that she should be doing something different with her life. There was a powerful coming together of context and ideas, united by a deep sense of purpose.
