SYCONIUM

The exhibition presents five separate reflections that explore various statements through shifts in scale and perspective, deliberately avoiding the trap of a “happy ending.” The works offer the viewer an immersion into a multilayered world, where deconstruction and meticulous sequencing of representational coincidences — from wasp to human inflorescence — reveal the futility of existence, tragedy without tragedy as the center of our perception of reality.

The key metaphor of the exhibition is the mechanism of existence of syconium, a biological structure that embodies a complex, rigid, but necessary union. It is through this union that the artists' visual poetics unfold, in which life and death, symbiosis and sacrifice, cyclicality and blind choice are closely intertwined, forming a rich field of meanings.

The siconium is not a fig fruit, but a hollow, closed shape with miniature flowers inside. It is only through a tiny hole that a fig wasp can enter it. As early as 90 million years ago, the fig tree learned to hide the flowers inside, and wasps learned to enter to pollinate and leave offspring. The female enters the male syconium, lays eggs and dies. Her offspring are born, fertilise each other, and the female flies out carrying pollen. But she doesn't know where she will end up next: if she lands in a female syconium, she will only pollinate flowers, doomed to die without descendants. The tree assimilates her body thanks to the ficin enzyme.

This ruthless ancient union became the starting point for artistic comprehension of the themes of symbiosis, doom, and repetition. Without it, there would be no figs. There would be no wasps.

Andrii Pidlisnyi's chaotic synthesis of randomly found spare parts visualizes a complex search for the interaction of elements that have changed their previous properties and purposes to new, more absurd and unpredictable ones.

The nature of the parts can have both metallurgical and natural origins, but in its final manifestation it is almost always a reflection on irreversible social mechanisms and a search for painful areas.

Olha Zaremba uses video art, painting, and installation to demonstrate humility before the interdependent symbiosis of humans and their environment. The caring compulsion to finish the food encourages us to immerse ourselves in our own world, where the salvation of fictional characters takes place.

The choreography of its characters is stuck between anabiosis and basic social functions, which drives the protagonist deeper into his irreal fantasies.

Nikita Tsoy, complementing the thesis of interdependence, talks about “social synchronicities”. The characters of the paintings witness the events of endless restructuring, visualizing the objects of the environment overloaded with patterns and eclecticism. The captured moments of body transformation appear to us in a semi-abstract, tragicomic intention.

The male wasp dies, breaking through the syconium wall to the outside world, the female wasp breaks her wings, making her way inside another syconium to leave her offspring. This absolutely beautiful and cruel mechanism has already calculated when we should be happy and when we should cry. However, in today's realities, the cyclical nature of life has shrunk to an ambivalent state, where an ordinary two-inch pipe on the playground makes us rejoice and cry at the same time. This process is portrayed in the series of works “Dual Purpose Ride” and “Iron Garden of Memory” and “Iron Garden of Hope”.

Mariia Matiienko builds a static and all-encompassing observation of cyclicality in the blue waves, in the swaying of countless strokes or cuts that confirm either existence or disappearance. The background, in which time puts fragments and voids of blue darkness, correlates the rigidity and irreversibility of what has already happened and what will happen. This is an attempt to create a new language for the sense of time and space in which we live, time broken into sharp fragments of events.

Each line is a moment that will remain forever and cannot be erased or changed. Office paper, taped together in large formats, acts here as a kind of canvas, but also as a document - a reminder of the everyday life that we once considered something stable.
Due to the ambiguous nature of her practice, where the process is no less important than the result, her work is never final.

Polina Verbytska presented works in delicate chalky white and pink shades, united in laconicism and focused on corporeality, which balances between calmness, vulnerability and detachment.

Organics and symbolism direct the focus to a diametrically opposite approach, which intends to move the dialog about the mechanisms of the inflorescence from the category of external to internal experience. The variety of materials and textures emphasizes touch as a way of understanding the tactile experience of ripening, emphasizing the tension between the inside and the outside.

Ceramics as a material in this context produces a series of ironic uncertainties that, from different angles, speaks through still life and portraiture, offering a sense of strength and fragility at the same time.

Contemplating the images of vulnerability, we are forced to confront thoughts about the stages of human comprehension of existence and our role in it.