"Forms of presence" or the challenge of wartime Ukrainian art
This exhibition fulfills the task of a therapeutic diary – it simultaneously conveys the depth of emotions and experiences of the artists, capturing them in a real physical space, and also documents the events of the long year of war from February 2022 to April 2023. Each work in the exhibition becomes a kind of testimony and a challenge to reflection, exciting the audience to consider events from different angles and learn the true image of war. In the space of the exhibition, each of the authors is present not only through their work, but also through their own history, which allows a broader understanding of the conditions in which these works became possible. The use of imperfect, rough materials mirrors internal experiences and demonstrates the ways in which war is present, through which life pulsates against the void of absence.
According to the curators of the project, Oleksandr Soloviov and Natasha Chichasova, one day, the familiar world disappeared. At least that's how it felt when the explosions woke me up on the night of February 24. This moment of the beginning of a full-scale war disrupted time, turning it into a rush of history that took on an almost merciless speed and the drag of anticipation at the same time. In this storm, things that surrounded us for years, familiar streets, cities, outlines of our own apartments and houses became translucent, fragile, ready to disappear at any moment.
"Presence, according to the definition of the philosopher Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, is a moment of feeling time, a spatial relationship with the world and objects – something that can be grasped by the human hand. If human activity is generally aimed at producing presence, then war produces absence. Absence is a void that takes away bits of memory that reminds us of life, weakens self-awareness, and interrupts history. That is why, in times of war, two practices of countermeasures – collecting and creating – acquire special importance. Collecting helps to accumulate the artifacts of being and makes forgetting impossible, and creation contrasts with the destruction of life.”
Yuriy Bolsa's large-scale work "Toy Monuments" is a chaotically scattered figures acting as toys scattered on the floor by a child. According to the artist, having done this with his childhood toys in the first days of the full-scale invasion, he saw a picture of the bombed-out Mariupol from above.
Anton Kariuk's work "My anti-tank hedgehog" is a series of hedgehogs made of smoky quartz. 3 of the beginning of the full-scale invasion of russia on the territory of Ukraine, one of the symbols of resistance of Ukrainians in the war became a hedgehog – the simplest anti-tank barrier, which is a three-dimensional six-pointed cross. Anti-tank hedgehogs of 1941 from the collection of the National Museum of the History of Ukraine in the Second World War came to the defense of the capital. After 81 years, they were performing their task again. According to the artist, the material from which the hedgehogs are made was not chosen by chance. Amidst the horrors of the newsreel and images of devastated lands in ashes, smoky quartz became the embodiment of a precious experience temporarily clouded by war. Anton Karyuk created 68 such products – as many days as the anti-tank hedgehogs stood before returning to the museum.
The artists' loss of support under their feet and stability in the first days of the war intensified the feeling of irreversibility, and material production became a way of resistance and evidence of the war, as if "grounding". This phenomenon was aptly described by the artist Lesya Khomenko: "When physical destruction reigns, we will physically create." So, working with the material became therapy, a document of time and a return to oneself.
The works of the exhibition "Forms of Presence" represent emotions, memories, and fears that materialize in real life in the form of art objects — so artists can leave them outside of their consciousness and fix them forever as an art object. They can channel the relentless process of creating reality into art instead of the horror of war. This creative ritual is the hope that the anti-tank hedgehogs will forever be transformed into miniature smoky quartz figures for museum storage.
As part of the exhibition, you can see the works of the following Ukrainian artists and artists: Yuri Bolsa, Andriy Denysenko, Anastasia Dytso and Sasha Roshen, Anton Karyuk, Yana Kononova, Olena Kurzel, Maksym Mazur, Daria Molokoedova, Daniil Nemyrovsky, Karina Sinytsia, Leo Trotsenko, Tamara Turlyun, Sana Shakhmuradova-Tanska, Vitaly Yankovo, Three exercises in realism, commercial public art and Svitlanka Konoplyova.
The text was prepared by Tetiana Safir, an art critic and art manager of the Imagine Point gallery
