Installation view of the exhibition Cycle of history at Autohaus Kreuzberg, Berlin, DE, 2023

CYCLE OF HISTORY _____ 15.09.2023 – 18.09.2023

Autohaus Kreuzberg, Berlin, DE

Through the layers of history, Sofiia Yesakova employs symbols and imagery drawn from past forms. Using this system, she seeks to initiate a dialogue with the future—one that underscores the cyclical nature of events in world history. “The thinking and feeling of the Middle Ages was permeated by the deepest pessimism; the world was on the brink of death, on death’s doorstep”, wrote Jacques Le Goff. An apocalyptic text can, with uncanny precision, describe the catastrophe we are witnessing with our own eyes today.

The overall project brings together artistic positions of Sofiia Yesakova and Polina Shcherbyna that, while overlapping in many respects, speak through different formal languages. It is a reflection on the parallel dimensions of a single contradictory reality. On the human capacity to adapt to any scale of tragedy, on the senselessness of war, and on our growing awareness of its paradoxical nature.

The death of the enemy is no longer distant or abstract—it has become unbearably present. In the opening chapter of On War, Clausewitz writes: “War is an act of violence, and in its application it knows no bounds; when one side compels the other to submit to its will, a reciprocal action arises, which, by its nature, must continue until the end.”

A “just war” is an oxymoron, the consequences of which we already know all too well.

Group exhibition

Curated by collective Autohaus Kreuzberg

Text by Sofiia Yesakova

Installation view of the exhibition Cycle of history at Autohaus Kreuzberg, Berlin, DE, 2023

War landscape in the optic of icons 2.1., Acrylic, gesso and wood board, 200 x 100 × 5 cm, 2022

Blind Spot. 1.1-1.10., 40 × 40 × 4 cm (X8), Acrylic, gesso and wooden boards, 2023