RECOLLECTING THE EMPTINESS _____ 16.06.2024 – 01.09.2024

Prima Kunst e.V., Kiel, DE

Is it possible to fill the gaps created by the lack of answers to some of history’s questions?
“The subject hastens to fill these gaps with appropriate ideas, sometimes even with pieces of the mosaic that do not fit.” — Jacques Lacan.

War memorials give the impression of something depressing and coldly detached, yet they have regained relevance in the context of disputes among various groups over history, over who is remembered, and how. The exhibition presents works from the Cargo 200 series. The working surface is prepared using techniques from icon painting, yet without specific iconographic images, only schemes, as if the structure of faith remains, but the content has fled. This installation reflects on the phenomenon of war as a whole, not merely on current conflicts.

Evil is always “the other.” One would never use such a word to describe oneself.

But evil is not outside us. It is sedimented in our silences, embedded in our omissions, in the rituals of forgetting we mistake for healing. Memorials do not preserve memory, they formalise oblivion, dressing amnesia in marble and symmetry. We mourn only to forget more elegantly. What begins as commemoration ends in abstraction, and abstraction becomes justification. The scheme without image, the icon without God. This is modern memory. A hollow liturgy of grief repeated to assure ourselves we are not complicit. We are. We always are. We turn memory into form. We give suffering a shape so that it becomes bearable. But form is a way of disarming horror. The icon without a face, the memorial without pain, the text without a scream—all of them are attempts to domesticate the unbearable. Symbols that once served as consolation now function as barriers. Not to remember, but to not come too close. The schemes etched onto the wood do not pray, and they do not accuse. They are silent. And silence, repeated a thousand times, becomes a system.

We live among objects meant to remind us of suffering, and yet we feel nothing. This numbed memory is worse than forgetting. Forgetting, at least, is honest. Memory reduced to form, to an aesthetic gesture, to a cultural obligation—is a lie passed off as compassion. There is no redemption in repetition. No salvation in understanding. History is a scar we scratch open again and again, just to prove we’re still alive. But that isn’t life. It is existence after defeat.

Curated by the curatorial collective Prima Kunst e.V.

Text by Sofiia Yesakova

Solo exhibition

Cargo 200. Experimental projections on surfaces. 5.1., 200 × 100 × 8 cm, Acrylic, gesso, gelatin and wooden board, 2023. Close-up

Cargo 200. Experimental projections on surfaces. 5.1., 200 × 100 × 8 cm, Acrylic, gesso, gelatin and wooden board, 2023

Cargo 200. Experimental projections on surfaces. 5.1., 200 × 100 × 8 cm, Acrylic, gesso, gelatin and wooden board, 2023