The “Growing Through the Cracks” project opens as part of the
Marginal Art Fair in collaboration with Sacred Heart University, Hiroo, Tokyo (Japan) on November 4.
The exhibition will run until November 28, 2025.

Curator: Maria Proshkovska

Project participants:

Vlada Ralko
Lina Romanukha
Olha Kuzyura
Anna Zvyagintseva
Maria Proshkovska
Maryna Tolutto
Lucia Nychayi


Curatorial text by Maria Proshkovska:

The participation of the Ukrainian project at the Japanese Marginal Art Fair and the exhibition at the Tokyo Catholic University opens a dialogue between the experience of marginal, (post-)traumatic, crisis and transformation processes in Ukrainian society and the approaches of emerging strategies - strategies that are not formed from the top down, but are born from the bottom up, organically, through constant response to change, unpredictability, chaos and networking.

Ukraine is currently experiencing a critically challenging historical period in which art plays the role of a facilitator of social, cultural and political transformations. The project demonstrates how new artistic strategies emerge from the experience of communities in a state of constant uncertainty: through self-organisation, mutual support, intimacy, improvisation, and flexibility in the face of danger and destruction.

The Ukrainian experience of marginality - not as the absence of a centre, but as flexibility and multiplicity of voices - resonates deeply with the audience of the Marginal Art Fair in Japan, a country with its own experience of trauma, destruction, radical transformation and revival.

Self-organisation, horizontal support networks, collective and radical care, fragmented narratives - these are the features that form a new ecology of coexistence in Ukraine today, and this is actively reflected in artistic research and processes. The project brings together women artists whose practice balances between the intimacy of the home and the publicity of the disaster.

The main conceptual vectors of the project are: Fragility as a method (works that acknowledge the fragility of the environment); Rituals of shared presence (new forms of care, empathy and adaptation in communities); Sensitivity to context (constant adaptation to new social, environmental and political changes).

The Growing Through Cracks project is an ongoing event in progress. The works feel incomplete, variable, and flexible. It is not an exhibition of finished works, but a space of being together in process.

The artists of the project "Growing Through Cracks" are those who create a space for collective care, conscious listening, empathy and support. This project is a field of living unpredictability where fragility is not a weakness, but instead becomes a source of birth for new forms.