2023-2024
cardboard, wood, coal, plaster, paper
The work is a study of a personal childhood experience of looking into wounds in the context of Christian philosophy and at the level of understanding the physical shell of the human body. It is a space for reconceptualizing the ethics of observing physical pain.
The project reveals the feeling of "own territory" in the range of the human body. Here it becomes the last barrier. The body experiences everything that we are not aware of, the experience lives in it and will look for a way out. The body will speak even when we are silent. The installations present material destruction and natural sketches, explore the idea of skin and walls as protective layers, the last barrier to the outside world. Understanding their strength and fragility is simultaneously perceived as an existential readiness to resist. Each and every one of us experiences a violation of our own space on various scales and not only on a physical level.
Schemes from the surgical manual here become a step-by-step study. It is a depiction of bodily suffering, which is not violence, but an intervention for salvation. The altered perception of emotional and physical pain during wartime transforms our vision. Returning to the body, studying it anew is a kind of attempt to restore the boundaries of the personal territory and feel oneself in them, to trust one's sensory systems again. After the consequences of the aggression, we all walk on the changed landscapes of the Ukrainian land. Landscapes of one's own being are no less important.
The project is presented as part of the exhibition "My Territory", the Center for Intellectual Art Merkury, Lviv, 2024.
