“I still feel sorry when I throw away food – Grandma used to tell me stories about the Holodomor.” (2018; with Andrii Dostliev)

Ink and pencil on toned paper, fragments of found photographs. Series of 44.

Post-photographic research, which explores traces of a traumatic historical event in everyday practices and in contemporary landscape and tests the limits of photography as a medium in trauma representation.

The starting point of this project was the personal sense of guilt which accompanies the acts of throwing food away. This feeling is common in contemporary Ukrainian culture and originates in our postmemory – it was imprinted into our generation’s behavioral patterns by the stories of our grandparents – survivors of the man-made famine of 1932-33 in Soviet Ukraine called the Holodomor, which killed millions.

The ink prints document the thrown-away food while fragments of found black-and-white photographs of unrecognisable landscapes demonstrate the lack of the famine’s traces in the landscape – unlike many collective traumas which have exact geographic locations and present in the landscape in the form of ‘places of memory’.

Exhibitions:

2021 — ‘Give us this day…’, Galeria Arsenal, Białystok, Poland
2020 — ‘Difficult Pasts. Connected Worlds’, Latvian National Museum of Art, Riga, Latvia
2019 — European University Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder), Germany (personal; with Andrii Dostliev)
2019 — MUHi Young Ukrainian Artists, Taras Shevchenko Museum, Kyiv, Ukraine
2019 — Nathan Altman’s prize finalists’ exhibition, Gallery XXI, Vinnytsia, Ukraine
2018 — ‘Conscious Sensation’, Mystetskyi Arsenal — Mala Gallery, Kyiv, Ukraine
2018 — ‘UNSEEN Dummy Award 2018 shortlist’, Westergasfabriek, Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Awards:

2018 — Ukrainian Dummy Award, first prize
2018 — UNSEEN Dummy Award, shortlist

February 17th, 2018
one big flaccid carrot

March 3rd, 2018 — dinner
brown rice with sausage