Ukrainian Texts Exchange on Feb 24, 2022 | Ukraine

EXHIBITION

GREIFBAR - WITHIN REACH: War in the View of Ukrainian Artists

"Greifbar: Krieg im Blick Ukrainischer Künstler" is an exhibition I curated at the Saarland Museum in Saarbrücken, Germany, that ran from April 22 to August 6, 2023.

Contemporary Ukrainian visual art currently exists in the context of war. It is surrounded by a lot of violence, big and small daily tragedies brought on by Russia's invasion in March 2014, which escalated to the biggest continental conflict since WWII on February 24, 2022.

The main question the exhibition asks is: can Ukrainian artists continue creative work in such circumstances? And if they do, how does the surrounding atmosphere reflect in their work?

The exhibition took place at the museum, which holds the largest collection of original plasters by the renowned Ukrainian sculptor Oleksandr Archipenko. Since his last visit in 1960, "Greifbar - Within Reach" is the first solo exhibition of Ukrainian artists at the Saarland Museum. It was a great honor and an opportunity to spotlight Ukrainian artistry during such difficult times.

When creating an open call for the exhibition among Ukrainian photography artists, I didn't know what to expect. It took place in December 2022. Ukraine was recovering from the initial shock of the Russian full-scale invasion and struggling with electricity power cuts. I was more than surprised to receive 80 projects, 15 of which I selected for the exhibition.

The main criteria for selection were multidisciplinarity, a multi-genre approach, curiosity, self-reflection, and a strong statement.

The photography projects that were exhibited are highly abstract, often autoethnographic, and tactile. The artists suddenly had very limited resources to continue working as they used to. If they were in Ukraine, they faced restrictions on going out and photographing, accessing studios, collaborating, printing, etc. If they were abroad, they were away from their regular workplaces and resources.

All of this made artists approach their work differently than usual: whether it involved destroying their own archive (Artur Buzenko), finding strength in family albums (Kateryna Hrynko), or burning the memories of a hometown that was erased (Alina Panasenko). Many projects incorporated textures, film grain, collages, stitching and embroidery, physical impact and fire, making their digital imprints—their windows of reality—more tangible (in German, "greifbar").