2019 / 2025

Installation
Material: thistle, burdock / burr

The work that marked a new phase of the project My Game was created specifically for the exhibition Art after 2000. A Glossary at Ukrainskyi Dim. The exhibition reflects on our shared history through art — as a means of anticipating future transformations and, at the same time, as a tool for their critical reflection.

Through the works of seventy Ukrainian artists, the project traces the transformation of artistic vocabulary unfolding against the backdrop of profound sociocultural shifts.

Curatorial team: Tetiana Kochubinska, Valerii Sakharuk, Oleksandr Soloviov, Kateryna Tsyhykalo

Olha Kuzyura’s project My Game was originally conceived for the Second Biennial of Young Art in Kharkiv in 2019 as a personal, almost intimate response to the curatorial theme, “It seems I am entering our garden.” The work emerged from a childhood memory: the sticky burrs of thistle from which the artist and her sister fashioned small figures in the garden of their parents’ home. These burrs became not only material for play but also an early experience of form-making, experimentation — and even cruelty. When the game ended, the thistle “bears” would end up tangled in the sister’s hair, and a familiar form would turn into an irritant.

The primary material of the installation is thistle — a weed burdened with the folk reputation of a nuisance that clings to everything. Within the space of the Ukrainskyi Dim, My Game unfolds as a gesture of recollection — not only of personal experience, but also of shifts within a shared visual landscape. The structure of the frieze echoes the monumental motifs of the building, where a stable image of the “hero” was once constructed. In Kuzyura’s work, this structure acquires a new meaning: instead of a heroic pantheon, what unfolds here is a fragment of memory, in which vulnerability and the personal become paramount.


Photo: Ihor Okunevsky for Ukrainskyi Dim, Serhiy Mazurash, Olha Kuzyura

The work is presented in the section “Memory Does Not Require a Monument.”
Curatorial text of the section:

Memory does not require a monument. It lives in images, in dreams, in emptiness. This section is situated in a space where a monument once stood. It is no longer there, yet its trace remains — in the memory of the building, in the exhibits, in fragments of history that surface in the surrounding objects.
The title of the section derives from the video work Monuments Do Not Erect Monuments (2021) by Dana Kavelina, in which the artist enters into an ironic, bodily encounter with Soviet monuments at the National Museum of the History of Ukraine in the Second World War. In the video, the monuments come alive, transforming into interlocutors or objects of fascination for the film’s participants — almost like living beings, stripped of the heroic immutability of their image.
The focus here shifts from a critique of monuments and decommunization gestures toward memory as lived experience — fragile, mutable, deeply personal. When the familiar structure of the world collapses, the very nature of memory changes as well. It no longer strives for monumentality, nor does it seek fixed images or canons. It returns to dreams, to the body, to emotion. As the philosopher Myroslav Popovych aptly observed, “History is not what happened, but what remains in people.” Memory does not end in archives or on pedestals. It endures — within an inner landscape, in personal experience, in a silence that cannot always be made visible.

This section speaks to the experience of remembering — to an intimate, not always articulated encounter with history. Here, memory does not sound in the voice of triumph. It speaks through surfaces, landscape, and sound.