Land and Sky of Kharkiv,
autumn 2022
Paper rolls, permanent marker, 2022
The work consists of 2 pieces: on the left – «Kharkiv land» («Hopscotch game»); on the right – «Night sky over Kharkiv».
On 24.02.2022, when Russia launched a full-scale war against Ukraine, my home city Kharkiv dove to a complete darkness due to the blackout regime. For more than 1 year you could see the stars over in the sky at night – quite rare thing for a city of 1.5M population, that always used to be full of electric light. But any of those stars can turn out to be a rocket or an enemy’s drone. Still this sky, even though it carried so much danger and threat, was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life – and the only sky under which I’d love to live forever. In March 2023 the city lights in Kharkiv were switched on, a one-year-long blackout has come to an end.
The second work depicts the land around my home city. The visual is based on the classic children hopscotch game – the ground is divided into sections through which one by one you need to jump till the end without stepping beyond the lines. The Ukrainian land is now divided the same way – but by sappers who square by square go through it doing their demining work. And there’s no safe square in these hopscotch, each can carry death to you. It will take years and years to get rid of all mines that Russians left on our land, and it’s scary to imagine how many people – soldiers, demining professionals and civilians – will be killed by them before it’s completed.
These both artworks remind me of the same feeling – feeling of insecurity, danger you suspect hiding invisibly in the most beautiful, peaceful and innocent things. And kind of an absurdity – from the understanding that a simple stargazing or a child game may bring death. But this absurdity became a routine for Ukrainians – we see and suspect danger everywhere, in every moving object, in every sudden noise. Because we know it’s there. The war is not over, and it won’t be over for a long time, for some it will never be over.
Russia launches numerous rockets at Ukrainian territory every day. Thousands of square kilometers of Ukrainian land and water are mined.
Mines explode and look like stars at some point. The night sky with the stars in it looks like the land filled with holes from the missile explosions.
Both works were created in frames of «What remains?» project in Schaumbad Freies Ateliers Graz (Austria) in 2022.
