Valeria Troubina

Из размышлений на тему собственного положения … и наблюдения за всем происходящим со стороны. У меня тогда в 14м году в Луганске было именно такое ощущение, я вроде бы ни при чем, и даже в безопасности, но глубоко под водой и нечем дышать, а мимо, на поверхности проплывет лодка жизни, которая похожа одновременно и на пулю по конфигурации и на гроб … и даже думаешь что можно вынырнуть на свет, но зрелище завораживает как сон!

This is a reflection on my own situation … and my observation of everything that is happening from the outside. In 2014, in Lugansk, I felt like I wasn’t involved, that I was safe, but that I was somehow deep underwater and couldn’t breathe, and that life, like a boat, floated by on the surface. Here it looks like a bullet or a coffin… and it seems like you could swim up into the light, it is like a vision in a dream!

Michelle Deignan

Liza Dimbleby

Ruth Maclennan

The following is a letter I wrote to the curator I was working with in 2013.

‘I have decided on a title for the exhibition. The title is ‘The faces they have vanished’. It is inspired by a quote from a film maker in 1937, about the faces that appear in films vanishing, and reappearing, only to vanish again, so evoking the magic of the moving image, and also its spectral quality. For me ‘they have vanished’ suggests the faces of poets and artists, that we know from photographs – who appear so distant in the photographs but whose writings are so immediate and contemporary. It suggests the artists and poets, and many other unknown people, who were ‘disappeared’ during the Soviet period (Mandelshtam et al). ‘The faces’ is somehow impersonal, and yet a face is personal, unique.

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Katja Stuke

Alisa Berger

Natacha Nisic

Anne Brunswic

La permanence 4.
Même décor. Même bruit de fond. Les masques chirurgicaux des examinateurs pendent sous le nez, ou sous le menton. Entre une jeune femme africaine, longiligne, voile noir, jupe longue noire, anorak noir, masque chirurgical. Elle s’approche timidement de la table, dépose une feuille.

L’examinateur : – Asseyez-vous ! C’est vous, Mme Fatoumata K. ? Vous avez reçu une convocation à l’OFPRA pour le 25 mai à 9 heures. (La jeune femme fait signe qu’elle ne comprend pas.) C’est un entretien où vous expliquez pourquoi vous demandez l’asile.

Fatoumata (à voix basse) : – Pas bien français. Soninké. Bambara.

L’examinatrice sort, revient avec un Africain vêtu d’un costume crème, environ 40 ans. Il se tient debout, à une certaine distance de Fatoumata qui garde les yeux baissés.

Au ton de sa voix et à son attitude, on devine que ce monsieur est ravi de s’acquitter d’une mission de confiance. Explications longues en bambara.

Le monsieur : – Le 5e mois, elle comprend, mais le 25,  elle ne connaît pas bien.

L’examinateur : – C’est dans un mois. Dites-lui bien d’arriver au moins une heure avant le rendez-vous. De notre côté, on va voir si on trouve un bénévole pour l’accompagner. Je note son numéro de téléphone et on va la rappeler.

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Manuela Morgaine

Nadia Lichtig

Alisa Berger

This radio episode, which was made together with @aemlx.global, is focussing on our friends musicians and DJs from Ukraine, and their activities of resistance since the beginning of the war that Russia started against Ukraine.
Artists: Oleh Shpudeiko @heinali , Alexey Shmurak @alexey-shmurak , Emilia Kurylowicz @aeglobal , Olesia Onykiienko @nfnr_music , John Object @johnobject , Anna Khvyl @anna-khvyl

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Katja Stuke

Nadia Lichtig

Catalina Swinburn

The determination of the stars to which some of the Egyptian temples, sacred to a known divinity, were directed, opened a way to a study, of the astronomical basis of parts of the Egyptian mythologies. It became obvious  that the mythology was intensely astronomical, and crystallized early ideas suggested by actual observation of the Sun, Moon, and stars.   The excavations revealed that several times in its history the complex had been razed to the ground to be re-erected and expanded on the same spot, yet each time with a slight change of orientation. The orientation of the temples must have been determined by certain stars, whose position in the sky changed over time, and this orientation was so quintessential that the temples of the earlier complexes had to be re-erected several times. It was not dilapidation that motivated the repeated construction work, but a religious necessity to follow the stars in the orientation of the temples. This is explained by the temples having been rebuilt upon old foundations, a thing which can be proved to have occurred. In the case of the Egyptian temples, the stated date of foundation of a temple is almost always long after that at which its lines were laid down in accordance with the astronomical ritual. No wonder, then, that the same thing is noticed in Greece.—From the N.Y.Sun,March,1894.

Anne Brunswic

La permanence (3).

Même décor. Les deux examinateurs.

Entre un couple de Russes, 35 ans environ, jeans, allure artiste, accompagnés d’une fillette blonde portant un nœud rose dans les cheveux. L’enfant gambade dans la salle puis revient en réclamant des câlins à sa mère.

L’examinatrice : – Si vous parlez français ou anglais, ce sera plus commode pour mon collègue.

Lui : En anglais, ça va.

Elle : – Pour moi, c’est mieux en français.

Suite des échanges tantôt en français, tantôt en anglais, tantôt en russe.

L’examinateur : Vous venez d’où ?

Lui : On est de Moscou. On est arrivés il y a deux semaines.

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Maricarmen Merino

Manuela Morgaine

March 22 to March 29

Natacha Nisic

Valeria Troubina

This is obviously a heavy work, which I made in 2019 and first exhibited at ArtKiev in the exhibition The Invisible curated by Oleg Sosnov. The project was dedicated to all the taboos of modern society, death being one of the most serious. No one wants to speak about it or even think about it even though it is an inevitable part of life – everything that is born is inevitably going to die … as it says in all the scriptures! Fear of death is the most important challenge of our lives; our future depends on how we prepare for it and face it. People often turn away from fear and do not want to understand or accept the fact of death.

Ruth Maclennan

Katja Stuke

Anne Brunswic

La permanence (1).

Une grande pièce nue. Une table, un banc d’école, deux chaises de plastique moulé vert menthe. Bruit de fond : conversations dans différentes langues étrangères, galopades d’enfants, cris de bébé. Assis sur le banc, un homme et une femme autour de 65 ans, retraités de la classe moyenne française blanche. On pourrait les prendre pour des examinateurs. Une dame arrive du fond de la salle.

Les conseillers/examinateurs : Bonjour. Asseyez-vous. Quel est votre problème ? Vous avez demandé l’asile ? De quel pays êtes-vous ?

La dame : Parler russe ? (L’examinatrice fait “oui” de la tête. Par la suite elle passera du russe au français pour que le co-examinateur puisse suivre). Je viens de l’Ukraine. De Donetsk. Vous connaissez ? (L’examinatrice fait “oui” de la tête.) Je voudrais un permis de travail.

L’examinateur (lentement, en articulant) : Vous… avez déjà demandé des… papiers ? Vous avez demandé… l’ASILE ?

La dame fait un geste pour montrer qu’elle ne comprend pas bien.

L’examinatrice (en russe) : Vous avez demandé le statut de réfugié en France ?

La dame fait signe que non. Elle montre son passeport.

L’examinateur : C’est écrit en cyrillique et en caractères latins. Née à Donetsk, 1984, Ukraine.

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Anne Dubos

Manuela Morgaine

Paris, March 21, 2022 
Dear friends from Kyoto, 
 It's the first day of spring here in Paris. For three days, a cloud or rain of ocher sand from the Sahara has covered our country and all of Europe. 
 It's hard not to see in this cloud of dust a radioactive threat from Russia...  
For this I learned to trace the word Heiwa/Peace by giving it the colors of Ukraine.  
May this sign be a lucky charm for all of us around the world.

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March 15 to March 22

Taia Galagan-Gershuni

Anne Dubos

Ruth Maclennan

We walked up the hill to Maximilian Voloshin’s grave above Koktebel. A great walk to the view – where Max V would light a fire on his way home from the gymnasium in Feodosia to Koktebel and his mother would see it and prepare for his arrival. People bring pebbles from the beach to lay on his tombstone; sometimes they write on them or leave money. Then we walked back down, tasting caperberries growing in the long grass. We walked to the Dead Bay, next to the Quiet Bay. We ran into the family we’d met on the walk up, at the beach. N and A and the twin boys. We swam in the sun and moonlight, spread the soft, black, sulfuric magic mud all over our bodies and floated in the warm still water. We then all squeezed in to the car to drive home for tea, champagne and melon. The boys played chess and understood each other fine. We spent several happy days together with the family we met on the walk. They rescued us from a place with twenty cats and no hot water. We stayed with them in Theodosia, and the boys played chess and ran around shouting together.  Now please come and stay with us!

Manuela Morgaine

Motanka dolls appeared in Ukraine five thousand years ago. Our Ancestors believed that natural threads and materials used to create these dolls are magical and protect family from evil spirits and tragedy: hay, straw, wood, herbs, dry leaves, grains, seeds, filled with fragrant herbs. The doll is an amulet, so it cannot have a human appearance. Empty face. Having no face, it is endowed with all physical existence and therefore it cannot cause misfortune. According to beliefs, people who added eyes, lips or nose to a Motanka would die with it, as their soul moved within the doll. Motanka is above all a protector of children.

Valeria Troubina

I painted this work in 2014, just after arriving in Kiev from Lugansk after the war in Donbass… This is the story. When my mother and I were sitting there during the bombing, without light or water or anything else, we had to prepare food over a fire, and I started the fire by burning old books (we had plenty!). One of the ones I came across was The Collected Works of Stalin, full of lies and propaganda about how to control people and the country… I burned it as a sign of protest… and photographed it as it burned! Later I painted this enormous work, 2 m x 3 m, and exhibited it in 2016…This photograph is from that exhibition. I am crying as I write this. At the time the image didn’t resonate as it should have… but I felt that it wasn’t the end of the matter… in Ukraine not everyone understood what had actually been going on.

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Katja Stuke

Claire-Jeanne Jézéquel

Dettie Flynn