"I Feel You"
An international group exhibition
March 8, 2024 – July 14, 2024

Performed by Pavlo Aldoshyn
Cast: Sana Shahmuradova, Mykhailo Romanov, Viacheslav Vasilyuk, Markiian Matsiiovskyi, Lyudmyla Bayeva, Dmytro Rasskazov, Halyna Melnyk.
Sound: Andrii Nidzelskyi
Colorist: Vadym Khudoliy
Сostumes and makeup: Alina Artiushenko
Produced by Viktor Shevchenko

Additional footage from the movie "Sniper. The White Raven", director Maryan Bushan, producer Artem Denysov.
The Ukrainian actor Pavlo Aldoshyn played the leading role in the film Sniper. The White Raven about the events of the Russian-Ukrainian war between 2014 and 2022. At the beginning of the large-scale invasion, Pavlo joined the armed forces of Ukraine.
The video work by Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk shows the former actor returning from the front to re-enact scenes from civilian life interwoven with scenes from the movie Sniper. The White Raven. In the video work, the soldier observes peaceful life and attempts to re-enact it as an actor. The change in perception of reality that Pavlo is confronted with becomes literal: from now on, everyday civilian life seems like a fiction that has to be acted out in order to be experienced. Instead, military actions or even their cinematic representation become more “normal” than everyday scenes. The new work by Khimei and Malashchuk, which was created for the exhibition I Feel You, therefore sensitively draws attention to the experiences of military personnel and the challenges they face in civilian reality. The video raises the questions: “What is normality today?”, “Is society sensitive enough to the military?”, “What is really important now?”.
At the same time, the artists consistently blur the boundaries between art and reality, emphasising the confusion between the constructed and the real that is symptomatic of our time. They note that images of war have been normalised by popular culture, which is why traumatic events such as explosions are often compared to movies today. At the same time, numerous photo and video recordings are subverted in the information war. The video thus offers a multi-layered reflection on how images and art function today.

Anton Saenko photographs the landscape of his home village of Hriazne in the Sumy Oblast in late autumn. The artist believes that this season best reflects the mood of the “earthy land,” in which everything gravitates downward.
The captured state of semi-ruin in which the village found itself after the collapse of the Soviet Union evokes associations with romantic landscapes. By capturing gloomy, misty sceneries and buildings mutilated by time, Saenko contemplates sadness and touches on the mystery.
Notably, in his practice, the artist focuses above all on the possibility of immersing oneself in the image. In this way, the landscape pulls the viewer out of his surroundings and brings them closer to the emptiness hanging in the air. The semi-conscious feeling of threat will manifest itself in the future — Russia looms on the eastern horizon.

In 1981, in New York, Jan Fabre held a performance called Art as a Gamble, Gamble as an Art, which dealt with the relationship between artists and art critics in the United States. The artist created a situation reversed from reality and took over the power, forcing critics to play the game according to his rules. Subsequently, Fabre conducted the critics while they read their critical reviews. Later, the artist and the critics gambled. So, the artist made a witty and at the same time critical statement about the functioning of the American art system.
In connection with the work of Jenny Holzer, Fabre's performance drawings reveal the threat to life that is trapped in processes that are merely games for politicians. At the same time, in a dialogue with Anton Saenko's work, Fabre's series highlights the emancipatory potential of art. The artist, who could have been seen as a "victim of the war", breaks free and captures Ukrainian landscapes in their immanent beauty.
In connection with the work of Jenny Holzer, Fabre's performance drawings reveal the threat to life that is trapped in processes that are merely games for politicians. At the same time, in a dialogue with Anton Sayenko's work, Fabre's series highlights the emancipatory potential of art. The artist, who could have been seen as a "victim of the war", breaks free and captures Ukrainian landscapes in their immanent beauty.
In May 2024, in Kyiv, Jan Fabre will hold a performance, where Mykola Lysenko's opera Taras Bulba will play, while the artist conducts the stars. In this way, Fabre shows solidarity with Ukrainians and pays tribute to Ukrainian culture.

Jenny Holzer's works, in dialogue with Anton Saenko's photographs, emphasize the political aspects of the images. Thus, Ukrainian landscapes became the subject of American politics, as a territory whose fate, among other things, depends on hidden political manipulations and negotiations. Therefore, the possible victory of Donald Trump in the US elections makes the documents that record his activities even more relevant in connection with the Russian-Ukrainian war.

The Damask rose is an ancient and iconic species of rose whose oil is used in perfumery and whose edible petals are used to brew tea and as an ingredient in dishes and skin care products. Since the time of the Crusades, the flower was brought to Europe and became a symbol of the Middle East. Today, the rose is threatened with extinction, as the Syrian fields near Damascus where it grows have been abandoned due to the ongoing civil war in Syria.
To create Damascus Rose, Kurdish-Turkish artist Fatma Bucak works with a network of volunteers who help to transport young rose cuttings from fields near Damascus to Turkey via Lebanon or Saudi Arabia and Italy. The transportation conditions are poor: the cuttings are usually transported in backpacks, so the roses are often held up en route, improperly cut and sometimes even destroyed. Those cuttings that survive the journey are grafted onto local plants by Bucak, where the exhibition takes place. The roses then either take root and grow under the new conditions or die. If the flowers survive, they remain in the country where they are exhibited after the end of the exhibition.
In this way, Fatma Bucak’s work tells of resettlement in the age of global migrations. Each Damask rose cutting has its own rescue story, its own path and its own perspective of adapting to a new place. The flowers embody the feeling of loss of home, the loss of security, the need to adapt to new conditions, but also the will to live and the strength to persevere. Roses that manage to recover after stressful events become the embodiment of resilience.
Part of the budget for the creation of this work, namely 10%, will be donated to charity at the artist’s discretion.
We would like to thank Abu Dhabi Art — Dyala Nusseibeh and her team — as well as Yanal Al-Shorafat and Manar Marzooq for taking care of these young roses, which has allowed some of them to survive and thrive in Abu Dhabi over the past few months.

In his work Tongues of Verglas, Danish artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen has created a digital simulation of the Arolla Glacier in Switzerland. In particular, the artist has documented and recreated an “ice tongue” — a natural phenomenon in which water flows out over the edge of the glacier and eventually forms a cave inside the glacier.
To document this phenomenon, the artist collected photographic material every day for two weeks in the Swiss mountains at an altitude of 2,300 meters. Later, more than 2,000 photos were collected in 3D and then transformed into a work of art in digital space with the help of video game technology.
One year after Steensen’s visit, in September 2022, the ice cave of the Arolla Glacier collapsed completely due to climate change. With this project, the artist not only aims to accurately and thoroughly document the last state of the cave before its collapse, but also to create a sensory connection between the natural phenomenon and the visitor.
Using a familiar environment of video game software, Steensen creates an exciting virtual immersion into the ice cave, even though this is no longer physically possible. In this way, every visitor can have the experience of getting to know the glacier through the combination of environment and virtual sensibility.

As part of his new project, Yuriy Biley worked with archive images by the German post-war photographer Rolf Goetze from the collection of the Stadtmuseum Berlin. In the photographs, Goetze documented democratic slogans from the May Day rallies in West Berlin during the Cold War, namely from 1960 to 1973. Biley uses charcoal to darken the surroundings of the slogans, thus removing them from their historical context and showing their relevance today, more than sixty years after the photographs were taken.
FREEDOM FOR ALL is the central work from the series FREEDOM FOR ALL — The Value of These Words Also Depends on You (2023). This universal democratic slogan becomes the final utopian point and goal that inspires the struggle. By presenting this series of works to an international audience, the artist emphasises that these slogans from the past of post-war Europe embody the values that Ukraine is fighting for today for the sake of the entire civilised world. According to the artist, the slogan “FREEDOM FOR ALL” demonstrates collective solidarity in which everyone can find a place for themselves at the same time.

In the sound installation by Indian artist Shilpa Gupta, poems by a hundred poets who were imprisoned and in some cases executed can be heard from a hundred microphones. The loudspeaker microphones hang over metal poles, to which sheets of paper with the quoted poems are nailed. The poems date from the eighth century to the present day and are written in Hindi, English, Spanish, Arabic, Ukrainian and other languages.
In Gupta’s work, the diverse poems are united by a common feature: each poem is the ultimate expression of freedom. The words that are spoken against the prevailing ideology acquire such a power of individual and collective expression of will that the state takes away their right to speak them. The geographical and temporal variability of the poems used testifies to the omnipresence of censorship, which appears to be a universal method of the repressive state apparatus. In Gupta’s installation, however, poets who have been deprived of their freedom and sometimes their lives are finally given a voice, and their poems appear in a shared and free space. The work thus becomes an act of resistance and functions both as a work of art and as a political gesture – just like the poems it contains.

The work Ground Shadows by Anna Zvyagintseva was originally created for the eponymous exhibition shown at Kazerne Dossin: Museum, Memorial and Research Centre on the Holocaust and Human Rights in Mechelen, Belgium. The project primarily referred to the massacres that had happened in Babyn Yar in Kyiv in September 1941.

The artist narrates a story about the tragedy not through showing human casualties or dramatic statistics, but rather through images of the wounds left on the landscape. The detail of the torn tree trunk, the through-whole in the tree, the root system turning into a human body — these universal symbols show how many stories are hidden in the memory of the land. In the situation of the deliberate silencing of the events by institutions of power, land sometimes remains to be the only witness. The images that lean into more conditional depiction make it unclear to which exact massacre the artist is referring.

​​In the spring of 2022, Kateryna Lysovenko and her two children fleed to Austria. The artist was temporarily accommodated in a house on the territory of a 17th-century Austrian castle.
The garden, which the artist interprets as a man-made paradise, is hidden behind chaotic, sharp strokes. Having found herself in an unfamiliar perfect space, Lysovenko captures how utopia dissolves against the background of anxiety caused by the present-day war. The roughly painted green background, in the author's words "ground that cannot be walked upon", emphasizes the loss of stability and a sense of alienation, coupled with the inability to predict the future.
People who take on the features of animals or mythical creatures in Lysovenko's works reveal the process of alienation. Symbolically, the artist's body has changed, and horns have sprouted from her head – as refugees are often perceived by Europeans as distinctive, strange creatures. It is noteworthy that the author works with the field of associations of images, in particular, horns resemble a headdress. She can remove it and assimilate herself in a new environment. However, the viewer chooses what to see: horns or a piece of clothing.
Another important element of the work is the peacock. An exotic bird brought to the European continent reminds us of the colonial past of the West. At the same time, the peacock is a rhyme to the self-portrait. Torn out of its natural environment, the bird adapts while remaining distinctive. Like the woman with horns, it manifests itself through its unusual beauty.

In the video, there are two birds on different sides of the window. The breath of the bird from outside settles in small drops on the glass.

The scene can be interpreted in two ways. Despite the physical barrier, the canaries communicate: they exchange glances, the breath of one becomes visible to the other. At the same time, this silent interaction can mean the impossibility of a real, boundless encounter, even if it looks like one.

A historical fact hints at another meaning. In the 20th century, canaries were used in Europe and America to detect toxic gasses in coal mines. As these birds were particularly sensitive to carbon monoxide, the miners took them into the mines and were guided by their reactions. If the canaries became agitated or died immediately when detecting the toxins, mining was stopped. The video thus shows the vulnerability not only of this dialogue, but of life itself.

And in conjunction with the work of Kateryna Lysovenko, Claerbout’s video focuses on the challenges of communication and mutual understanding. At the same time, Breathing Bird, like Anna Zvyagintseva’s installation, offers a non-human perspective and shows how nature can imprint and transmit a traumatic experience.

Shadow Does is a video work created by Turner Prize-winning French artist Laure Prouvost.

In the video, a little girl tells a story in which almost every sentence begins with the words “Grandma, did you know...". The sentences then describe the innovations and changes in modern everyday life, e.g. that women can now study at universities, but the girl also mentions global warming or the extinction of animal species.

Thanks to an almost ritualistic way of conveying information — shadow play — the work gives the impression that the child is not talking to her real grandmother, but to an ancestor, a foremother who has long since passed away.
The video ends with the girl's seemingly absurd statements, and it is difficult to tell whether this is her assumption of what the future will look like, or whether it already exists in the artist's fantastic meta-universe, or whether the viewer is now standing in the position of the progenitor and listens to the world endure more dramatic changes.

Something Unfolding is a sketch for the work to be presented at the exhibition Daring to Dream in a World of Constant Fear, organised by PinchukArtCentre as part of the parallel program of the Venice Biennale 2024.
In her work, Kateryna Aliinyk deals with the contradictions created by the “reproduction” of the currently unavailable landscape in the east of Ukraine. In Aliinyk's work, the dream space can be alluring and awaken the desire to finally approach the lost land. At the same time, the artist points out that the disappearance of a person from the landscape is a solely human tragedy to which nature is actually indifferent. The abandoned landscape “becomes the main character” and independently copes with the remnants of war, leaving no room for the human figure.
It is noteworthy that the sketch shows a dividing strip between agricultural fields. In this way, the "intense eventfulness" of the landscape, which has a life of its own, unfolds even in a place that would be inconspicuous and unimportant to a human being.

The Mexican-American artist Felipe Baeza explores deeply spiritual themes in his works, which mainly revolve around the human body. In his mixed-media works, a combination of textiles, ink, paper, acrylic and other materials create an image of a body that transforms into different shapes or expands and grows to become something different, sometimes completely amorphous. Baeza’s creations offer the body an opportunity to renew itself, free itself from labels, beliefs and stereotypes imposed by society, and accept itself.
Baeza’s works deal with issues of emigration, adaptation to a new life and other related aspects. Felipe Baeza was born in Mexico and immigrated illegally across the border to the United States at the age of seven to reunite with his parents, who were already living in Chicago. In his works, Baeza reconstructs his motherland and culture as he feels and remembers it. The artist explores the fragility of identity and traces how this identity changes far from home under the conditions of forced migration.

Anton Saenko made an object from soil taken from the vegetable garden of his home village of Hriazne in the Sumy Oblast. In this way, the author embodied his thoughts on the connection between his own identity and the land. In particular, Saenko claims that the vegetables that grew in this soil influenced his physique. Therefore, human features can be traced in the contours of the earth — the sphere becomes a self-portrait.
After the full-scale invasion, the work takes on further meanings. The land is primarily defined as a territory that is transformed into a battlefield and at the same time becomes a target for the enemy. It is embedded in political narratives, while its fertile and other qualities are neglected. Thus, the sphere appears as a monument — the ground, detached from its source, symbolizes itself and its own particularity.
Finally, as a universal cosmic form, the sphere can be a miniature of our planet. By dividing into two halves, it manifests its will and outlines the point of no return.