2025

Installation
Materials: paper / blind embossing, nails

The installation Time Gained was first conceived for the project “UKRAINE: INHALE/EXHALE!”, organized by the contemporary art gallery ZAG to represent Ukraine at the International Triennale in Milan (Italy) in 2025. Curator: Khrystyna Berehovska. Co-curators: Karina Davydova, Vira Tuchapska.

The Ukrainian Pavilion responded to the theme “Inequalities” and was presented from 12.05.2025 to 09.11.2025 at Viale Alemagna 6, Milan.

Each imprint is produced from a flat sheet of paper. Here, the material exceeds its own physical limits and partially collapses, yet preserves a profound embossed trace, generating an edition — a document.

The imprints were taken from the palms of members of my family: four generations simultaneously experiencing war, some of them not for the first time. These paper reliefs are transferred both from the surface of the body and from plaster casts of the hands of those with whom my bond is formative and essential. The installation also incorporates imprints from fragments of destroyed sculptures — creations that did not endure this war.

Time Gained later became part of the project “Waiting for Christmas: Stories of an Indestructible Celebration” in Lviv, as the imprints were formed during the Christmas season over recent years. Curator: Anna Khoma.
The project was presented at Mercury Art Center from 06.12.2025 to 01.02.2026.

For me, the anticipation of Christmas emerges as a space of light and care, formed prior to any conscious understanding of my family’s traumatic history. Memory is transmitted not through words but through rituals, gestures, and manual labor. Small domestic skills — cultivating currants, embroidery, baking — become markers of both absence and continuity.

“Waiting for Christmas was my most cherished time in early childhood — a period when I did not yet know my family history, saturated with the experiences of the Holodomor, the forced resettlements of Operation Vistula, the losses of the Second World War, labor camps, and repression.
Before the holidays, we would find bright postcards from relatives in America in our mailbox. I did not understand why they were there or how they had ended up on the other side of the ocean. In the days before Christmas, my grandmother and mother would gather with us in the kitchen: my sister and I were taught to bake cakes and pastries, as if we were being entrusted with an invisible craft of creation. It was a time of the longest and warmest conversations — about everything except sorrow. There had to be an abundance of dishes, and today I can recreate most of the recipes — my hands remember.

Grandmother Paraska would always gift us handmade embroidered ornaments. She would ask in advance about our dreams — and simply materialize them with her own hands.

At Christmas, we were allowed to open the most precious jar from the pantry — blackcurrant preserves. I disliked picking the berries because of their sharp scent and the painstaking labor involved, yet for some reason currants always grew abundantly in our garden. Only at the age of thirty did my father share a memory of my great-grandmother’s orchard — a house and garden that no longer exist. Currants grew there as well. Today, I know how to cultivate them myself.

I did not inherit a fully articulated family history — neither oral nor written. There is no documentation of experiences that, in today’s reality, would reveal themselves to me entirely differently. The most important narratives were transmitted not through texts, but through actions and gestures. That is why I turn to the body as a bearer of memory. Internal censorship — layered through generations — became the point of departure. The time when these conversations could have taken place has passed. What once seemed like loss now grants me the possibility to construct my own forms of dialogue between generations that can no longer meet in person.

In my recent autobiographical works, I engage with intergenerationality and inheritance. Reconstructing a family history marked by multiple forced displacements, I record the imprints of my relatives’ hands — now traces of four generations simultaneously living through war. Among them are the palm prints of my son.

These prints are born within a ritual of endless repetition — in routine, often invisible labor aimed at resisting erasure and oblivion. The paper object may be fragile and temporary, yet the gesture, the act, the repetition that produces the trace remain enduring. It is they that shape a space of memory that continues to speak where voices have already fallen silent.”