___

I found out that a museum in my city had been destroyed under russian shelling on the first day of preparation for the exhibition in Taiwan. Another museum, objects of material culture, archives. So far we do not know what other losses we will suffer. Our memory and self-awareness are a threat to russian imperial ambitions, which should have no place in today's world.
___


I have been living through a full-scale war in Ukraine for the second year already, and my observations of the transformation of the role of culture and arts in such critical times have led me to optimistic conclusions. But at the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, it was very difficult for artists to deal with ethical and aesthetic reasons to speak or remain silent. Literature and art did not protect our relatives from bullets and rockets. However, it was this universal language that allowed us to get out of our stupor and begin to outline our experiences. Being able to name one's experience allowed society to realize itself as a collective body. It hurts every loss, every destroyed building. But it is easier to experience phantom pains with a collective body than alone, within the limits of one's own, tiny body.

Right now I understand — as a society we need to expand the boundaries of our collective awareness. Striving to be heard and seen, it is extremely important to first see your interlocutor holistically with all his/her pain, experience of fear, love. The development of deep empathy is addressed up to the primary bodily level of sensations. The idea of the project is to return to the body, the body as a carrier of our experience. Being aware of memories and reality at the plane of how they sound on the physical level and finding a new embodiment of them in the appropriate material, we experience changes in memory and self-perception.

In Ukraine, and later in Taiwan, I created a series of objects that form an installation. I work with the technique of blind printing on paper, which allows me to make three-dimensional prints from various objects, preserving the non-permanent states on its surface. Paper, which is literally a document on which we record a statement, such as a fact of birth and death, is paradoxically impermanent physically. He has always been a bearer of memory and values. And we trust this document, the information it carries.

Paper also absorbs dirt, soot and rust from the object. These are the layers that are so associated with the layers of experience that we feel on our skin now. It is an experience of anxiety and premonition of danger. But this fragility taught us to love and care for everyone and everything around us even more. Among the surfaces from which prints were removed are details of buildings that were restored already during the war. At the time of such large-scale destruction, restorers recreate for us the material heritage that carries such valuable symbols into the future. On the paper, the shape of human hands is pre-imprinted on the surfaces of the houses of Ukraine, the surfaces from our house, which we protect with our own hands.

This work becomes a painful commentary on the reality we face in Ukraine, but also evidence of the formation of a new way of formation of collective memory.

Project “Under the single skin” was presented at the Digital Art Center Taipei in January 2024. Thanks to the cooperation of Gallery 101 and AVAT - Association of the Visual Arts in Taiwan, Ukrainian artists, together with Taiwanese authors, rethought the processes of memory and identity formation. The joint exhibition Landscapes of Memory curated by Marta Trotsiuk highlighted common denominators in our experience, allowed us to communicate them in such different and harmonious mediums.

Artists: Fei-hao Chen, Olha Kuzyura, Maria Proshkowska, Ciwas Tahos.

Fragment of the installation “Under the single skin”. Paper/blind printing.
Textures from the surfaces of the walls and roads of the Treasure hill area, where I lived in Taiwan and which I researched, were transferred to paper by the method of blind printing. From the obtained material, I made a print of my own hand. Fragile and yet visible traces of every gesture to save one’s home, to preserve its memory…

Fragment of the installation “Under the single skin”. Paper/blind printing.
The wing is that restored element from the house that contains so much about freedom, the fragility of our sky, our fragility.

The installation includes prints taken from mailboxes from Kharkiv, which suffered from the Russian occupation and is still suffering from active missile attacks. Now they are traces of addresses of apartments that do not exist. The address to which letters will no longer arrive.