2024
Paper, nails
Every road is marked by fire. Some roads are obliterated with silence. Some roads are missing from the demining map. It is impossible to walk down memory lane. You can only find yourself on a tangent to these paths. Unlike stone and metal, paper is more fragile than the human body. The traces of fire on it lose the dimension of physical pain. These traces will go with us far into the future. Paper prints taken at the crossroads form a frame for the icon of the Holy Mary with Child. The Unburnable Kupyna is a folk icon of the Chernihiv region that saves from fire and cruel disasters. The Hodegetria in the octagonal star is surrounded by the angels of the elements, flowers, and archangel symbols. There is a flame around her, in which she does not burn.
“In 2024, I first came to the places where my father's parents came from. Almost an entire generation left the Chernihiv region after World War II for their own safety. The project was influenced by the testimonies of women who survived the occupation, personal conversations with residents of the Chernihiv region's settlements occupied and isolated between February 24 and April 3, 2022, as well as known facts from the lives of my family's women during the Holodomor and World War II.”
The installation was created as part of the project ""The Soil Under My Nails Reminds Me of Dried Blood." Curator: Alya Segal
Organizer: Artsvit Gallery, Dnipro
Partner: The Naked Room, Kyiv
The public organization Northern Cultural Capital collected testimonies of women who survived the occupation of Chernihiv Oblast. Special thanks to Kateryna Lytvyn and Oleksandr Shevchuk for her trust and support in this journey.
..."The front line is unstable. Some cities pass through this line several times. Others are gradually approaching her, although it seemed that the settlements did not know how to walk. The earth, whose image in many cultures is a symbol of the mother from which life is born, eventually accepts the bodies of murdered people into its soil. Wheat is not the only thing that sprouts from black earth – if we listen, we will hear stories being told to us through the layers of the earth. Are we ready to listen to the stories of the dead? Are we ready to hear the stories of the living?"...
A fragment of the curatorial text for the exhibition "The Soil Under My Nails Reminds Me of Dried Blood" by Alia Segal.
Participants: Kinder Album, Anna Zvyagintseva, Olga Kuzyura, Darya Molokoedova, Margarita Polovinko, Dasha Chechushkova
The Naked Room, Kyiv, June 05 - 29, 2024
Artsvit Gallery, Dnipro, July 5 - October 5, 2024
The exhibition is supported by the Partnership for a Strong Ukraine Fund, which is financed by the governments of Great Britain, Estonia, Canada, the Netherlands, the United States of America, Finland, Switzerland, and Sweden.
