When Faith Moves Mountains

Watercolor, paper.
Courtesy Odesa Fine Art Museum.

The Bomb Shelter is part of the War Album series created by Kinder Album at the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Russia into Ukraine, capturing the most resonant artistic images that arise in the everyday life of war.

Sequins on plastic plates.
Courtesy Collection M HKA, Antwerp / Collection Flemish Community.

At first sight, Tremor, Rumour, Hoover is just a rhyming wordplay, but a closer look reveals its complexity, which mediates a feeling of anxiety. The work is more reminiscent of a quick, nervous laugh, than the genuine release brought about by humour. Its letters' garish, clashing colours tease the viewers' perception, whereas large, shimmering sequins, that are supposed to move in the wind, undermine any feeling of stability. It feels as if the festive material, normally used for commercial signs or billboards, should be alluring, but it is not.

Alptekin created this artwork two years after the large Izmit earthquake on 17 August 1999 in Istanbul, which caused tremendous damage. This work could be seen as an attempt to cope with the anxiety and fear that accompany the anticipation of future, possible natural disasters.

Sometimes, the situations one is confronted with in one's immediate environment are so unbearable that they become ridiculous. Then the only way to adapt one's mentality and deal with this condition is to turn to humour. In a permanent state of danger, constant air raid sirens and incoming rocket fire, ironic jokes become one of the ways to maintain any mental stability.

Video 15'09''.Courtesy Collection M HKA, Antwerp / Collection Flemish Community.
The installation presents documentation of the participative performance When Faith Moves Mountains, in which Francis Alÿs invited eight hundred Peruvian volunteers to displace a mountain by 10 cm. The performance took place on the 11th of April 2002 as part of the Third Ibero-American Biennial of Lima. Even though the task itself sounds impossible, it did not demotivate the crowd involved. On the contrary, it motivated the volunteers to unite and try harder in the desire to contribute to a common goal.
With this absurd gesture, Alÿs's work reflects on the topic of social unification in times of need, the willingness to build Utopia, and, above all, it conveys the concept of believing in one's strengths even when the aim may seem entirely out of reach. At times of political upheaval and war, faith and unity can make the impossible possible when the community chooses to unite, as it is presently being demonstrated in Ukraine.

Ink on cotton.
Courtesy Collection M HKA, Antwerp / Collection Flemish Community.

Babi Badalov's I am Euromental is an installation of works in ink on textile that is dedicated to linguistic explorations and associations. Badalov's word games and text images transcend the normative language system. Writing becomes a form of drawing. Sound and pronunciation cause a shift in meaning. However, it is not about this game in itself. Badalov uses his visual poetry to address broader political and social issues, such as nationalism, cultural integration, consumption, gender equality and globalisation. The nomadic life of an artist (or traveler, migrant, refugee) does not only cause him or her the struggle of an adaptation period of cultural integration but can primarily turn him or her into a prisoner of language. Thereby, the artist covers current geopolitical topics that echo his personal experiences as a person from a minority group in his own country of origin.

In the current context of Ukraine, millions of IDPs from Ukraine have faced the integration problems that Badalov touches upon in his work. They have become even more relevant, given the history and unique geographical position of Ukraine.

Horse skin, polyester, metal, plastic, blankets.
Courtesy Collection M HKA, Antwerp / Collection Flemish Community.

The installation In Flanders Fields, 2000 by Berlinde De Bruyckere presents a naturalistic picture of a stuffed horse that is forever frozen in an unusual pose within the space of the white cube gallery space. The horse, which in classical culture usually stands for courage, strength, and beauty, in this case, is literally turned upside down and becomes an object devoid of its usual qualities.

The title of the artwork, In Flanders Fields, refers to the eponymous poem written during the First World War by Canadian physician Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae. Later the piece became one of the most cited poems about war and inspired to use of red poppies, mentioned in the poem, as a symbol of remembrance. Even though the poem was written more than 100 years ago, sadly it remains actual and could be easily perceived as a reflection of the manifestations of the injustice of war, that are unfolding right now:

'... We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields…'

— John McCrae, 1915

Video, 4'14".
Courtesy of the Artist.
Created during the residency Landscape as a Monument by IZOLYATSIA.
Music: SELERA, 2022.
Editing, subtitles: Lera Guevska.

Oleksandr Burlaka travels through the steppes of South Eastern Ukraine, which was known before the industrialization of the region as the Wild Field. In the XVIII century, a period of transformation of these areas into a large industrial region started.

To form a route, Oleksandr turned to field maps of the 16th century which were commissioned by the Tsar of Moskovia Ivan IV the Terrible. The Book of the Great Drawing is a later textual description of this lost map.

The historical stratification of the network of trade and military roads would later become the core of the urbanization of the region and the scheme for the coal mining industry. All the routes described in the book are leading from the Crimean Peninsula towards the North.

The book contains descriptions of various territories, rivers, and roads that interested the Moscow state of that time. The artist works with descriptions of the Muravsky and Izyumsky ways. Following the found texts, and mapping the landscapes with the help of video he creates a situation of simultaneous existence of narratives of the past-present-future.

The video combines different angles of observation of the environment: the perspectives of a human and that of a drone moving over landscapes.

Video 15'44''.
Courtesy of the artist.

In both the film and performance, the artist herself consecutively impersonates three characters: Lenin, Hitler, and Einstein. She cuts up plush toys and makes wigs or moustaches from their stuffing to look more like this or that character. The voiceover reads fragments of Sigmund Freud's works on the influence of early sexual experience on subsequent life (during the performance, the quotes were projected onto the screen behind the artist); the works include pictures of these historical figures as young children. Each section is interspersed with fragments of videos from the installation entitled Piece of Shit

Acrylic on canvas.
Courtesy Collection M HKA, Antwerp / Collection Flemish Community.

Jan Cox's oeuvre is profoundly impacted by his experiences as a young person of the German Nazi regime. This is the horror he acted against throughout his career. His works are usually characterized by compositions with a magical, surreal atmosphere, with references to 'classical' themes such as violence, cruelty, and vulnerability. In Oh! Those Voices, Boston Cox combines the experience of daily life with flashes of memories and feelings. These visions, which might seem to have been induced by intoxication, are not actual phantasms but the ghosts of death and doom, like those we encounter in stories from the Bible and in Greek mythology. Likewise, in Ukraine, the traumatic experience and horrors of war are melting into everyone's daily life – from doom scrolling when reading the news, to the sudden reminders, that are capable of ruining rare moments of tranquility in a flash.

Oil on canvas.
Courtesy Collection M HKA, Antwerp / Collection Flemish Community.

Sacrifice represents a person seen from the back, who is facing a line of legs and feet. Marlene Dumas uses photographs and films as source material, alters and enlists them for her own purposes.

Dumas allows reality to resonate in painting. She starts out from reality and moves into a pictorial reality, whereby she merges intimacy, embedded humour, tragedy, experience, and acceptance. In her work, feelings, reflection, and action appear to operate in concert.

It is impossible to estimate the tenor of her intentions, for a painter can in the end only be read in the painting's form. The work's title, the way it is painted, and the use of colour convey the impression of an emotional event. However, we do not know exactly what is happening. Dumas leaves ample room for interpretation.

In the context of Ukraine today, Sacrifice could sound like the voice of every Ukrainian woman: vulnerable in the face of an aggressor.

Mannequin, plaster, clothes, smoked meat, table, chair, microscope, nails, thumbnails.Courtesy Collection M HKA, Antwerp / Collection Flemish Community.
This early work by Jan Fabre – an artist who is himself not uncontested, having been recently convicted in Belgium of the assault and sexual harassment of women – was first presented in a gallery which was located opposite a bar of a right-wing militia with neo-Nazi affiliations. The exhibition Fabre made was an overt response to that organisation. It was defensive, in a vital, self-assured way. At the same time, it takes a radically different orientation.
Studded in gold tacks, Jan Fabre creates his own effigy as one before a table, looking through a microscope, scrutinizing and observing the world, much as his art does. The protective shell the artist created for himself is both alluring and repellent, with its thousands of beautiful, yet sharp pins. Such an ambivalent reaction is triggered by instincts that make us human – a desire for beauty combined with self-defence that is physical, mental and emotional. But this dream suit has visible gaps, symbolizing fragility and feelings we cannot control.
It is a kind of a shell that every Ukrainian now is familiar with because of the need to deal with reality. But it's never fully protective.

Oil on canvas.
Courtesy of the artist.
Created during the Working Room Residency.

Continuing to work on a series devoted to the research of industrial design objects of the Soviet period, currently in the form of stained-glass windows of hospitals, military enlistment offices and fire departments, Galkin forms a holistic statement in the current wartime context. The black-and-white reproductions show stained-glass windows from the Dnipro region with smoky glass and smoky sky, either damaged by shock waves from missile strikes, or broken and dismantled as part of the current decommunization program in Ukraine. Also transferring fragments of stained-glass panels to the canvas, Galkin gives them not only a new meaning, but also the status of a work of art, which they never previously had.

Fabric, metal, stone, paper.
Courtesy Collection M HKA, Antwerp / Collection Flemish Community.

The work Down Under, 2009 presents several objects laying on the floor, which look like colourful duvets. The artist had bought them more than 30 years previously from poor women craft tailors who were doing this for a living. The women, in their turn, were using patchwork techniques to sew together leftovers of fabric or pieces of used textile found elsewhere. Some of the fabrics resemble mourning patterns, and some are reminiscent of peaceful landscapes. The red water pipe grounding the textile introduces a feeling of disturbance, of a violent intervention to the naive and innocent appearance of the handmade installation. Nevertheless, the textile object remains the first colourful stain caught in the viewer's sight, as the centre of attention, resisting the violence of the industrial object. This work shows the importance of collecting important things, the artefacts, with the aim of researching, saving, protecting, preserving, and rethinking one's own culture.

Video.
Courtesy Collection M HKA, Antwerp / Collection Flemish Community.

In his work, Hiwa K examines the events, encounters and many cultural and social paradoxes that have determined his life and personal experience as a political refugee. In Moon Calendar (Iraq), he tap-dances to his own heartbeat, which the public can hear live. As the dance proceeds, he loses control over his fast-moving feet, which after a certain point are unable to keep up with his heartbeat. The video was shot in one of Saddam Hussein's former security buildings in Iraq. Although the video only shows a rehearsal, the viewer inevitably reads the work through the context of historical events, and the traumas of people who were imprisoned, tortured and killed there. The heart as the centre of the body is challenged. By denying it and remaining silent about the event, the artist paradoxically renders it visible. Thus, such an immerse practice becomes not only the possibility to tell the story of a people's pain, but also opens the way for healing and overcoming trauma.

Drawing on paper.Courtesy of the artist.
Plants are fundamentally different organisms: the leaf of a plant isn't the same as a human's arm. In general, plants have a different way to pass information to each other, as well as recover and defend in front of a danger. Kakhidze has been researching plants for many years, her optic on the plant world during war became even more sharp, as well as giving a hope for the future for human civilisation. In march of this year when Russian tanks were close to her studio in Muzychi she wrote on her studio's door: "Follow the example of plants, they are pacifist, as much as possible on our planet."

Charcoal on paper.
Courtesy of the artist.

"In the middle of March, I started drawing black ploughed soil with a human figure lying on top of it, over and over again. Or, if we look at it another way, a horizontally aligned human silhouette overlaying a picture of soil. The motif is concretised through repetition. It has been repeated dozens of times from March until today. This motif has certainly been inspired by: the image of Ukraine's "fertile soils", together with all related colonial connotations; photos of the invaders' corpses and the famous narrative of sunflower seeds in their pockets*; photos of their victims; makeshift graves in agricultural land plots; trenches turned into mass burials; land pollution caused by the war; tomorrow's famine; bodies yet to be discovered; the "poisoned landscapes."** I define the figure overlapping the earth on those drawings as a shadow. While soil absorbs, a shadow stays on the surface. A shadow marks places and times where and when, for the umpteenth time, human life ceases to be the ultimate value. In addition, a shadow cannot be hidden under a layer of earth, concealed or erased in any other way."

* Marder, Michael. «Vegetal Redemption: A Ukrainian Woman and Russian Soldiers». The Philosophical Salon, 26, February 2022
**Oslavska, Svitlana. "Martin Pollack. Poisoned landscapes". https://krytyka.com/, Krytyka, February 2016

Acrylic on canvas.
Courtesy of the artist.
Created during the Martha MOCA Artist Residency.

Khomenko's artistic practice is currently focused on the ways of looking at the war and the ways the war represents itself. In her works, the artist combines found images with her own experience and the experiences of her nearest and dearest.

This painting is based on a photo posted online by Andriy Rachynskyi, an artist who, after the outbreak of the war, became a volunteer turned to volunteering and helped with for acquiring and bringing logistical supplies to the army after the outbreak of the war. The photo is a selfie made by Ukrainian soldiers, retouched to conceal their faces and weapons.

Khomenko collects photographs depicting soldiers with their faces and backgrounds digitally obscured by means of glitching, pixelation, blurring, or hatching. Ukraine's martial law prohibits taking photos of military facilities, soldiers, and equipment on security grounds. Photography ceases to be an instrument and becomes a dangerous weapon. By turning found photos into paintings, the artist references the historical tradition of depicting war, as well as translates the language of digital imagery into that of painting. Her way of processing the images includes fitting pixelated fragments into the figures of her characters to dehumanise and deconstruct them.

"Contemplating the original photos, I see that retouching doesn't remove strategic information from them; on the contrary, it adds new information that layers up just like characters' skins in video games. Thus, pixels represent a kind of a 'superpower' owned by these 'superheroes'. In the digitalised world of information warfare, pop culture exists side by side with a real war, and I, being an evacuated civilian, tend to mix up the images. I want my characters to look scary, I want them to make any 'brainimical'* Russian looking at my works drown in dehumanising agony."

* i.e. brainwashed + inimical

Lesia Khomenko

Screen print, vinyl, chassis.
Courtesy Collection M HKA, Antwerp / Collection Flemish Community.

We Are Not What We Seem is created by American conceptual artist and designer Barbara Kruger who often places her critical messages on sexual, social, and political issues inside the alluring and familiar formats of commercial visual languages.

The artwork presents an image of an emancipating woman who is ready to fight for the perception of herself in others' eyes. Despite the laconic poster form of the piece, the message written in the collage remains unclear: whom is she defending except herself: who are 'we'? How are 'they' seen and how should 'they' be seen? Is the viewer a part of 'them' or is the viewer in the confronted position of referent?

The ambiguity of senses collapses in the simplicity of the media chosen by the artist. Now the responsibility of the self-identification and positioning in the conflict is on the viewer. Living in the era of fake news and constant media manipulation it seems like there is no way to surrender to digital nonsense consuming everyone inside and constant critical analysis could be one of the resistant tools.

Oil on paper.
Courtesy Collection M HKA, Antwerp / Collection Flemish Community.

Video, 5'00".
Courtesy Collection M HKA, Antwerp / Collection Flemish Community.

Mark Lewis's artistic practice refers simultaneously to the realms of visual art and classic film – his film installation often references the history of narrative film, but are simultaneously too static, too 'sculptural,' to be fully appreciated as film. Oftentimes they merely show or deploy the technical possibilities of film rather than the logic of narration that we have come to expect from them. In Lewis's video The Pitch zooming out of the camera becomes the only movement in the visually static picture. The artist himself is depicted in the middle of the picture reading the text in which he tells a story of the 'extras', the unnamed armies of so-called supernumeraries without whom thousands of films would appear desperately empty. Indeed, in any grand narrative, the citizens are merely extras.

Video 8'52".
Cameraman Andriy Zhyzhko.
Created during the Working Room Residency.
Courtesy of the artists.

This new work by Malashchuk and Khimei refers to a classical piece of Ukrainian contemporary art If I were a German by Fast Reaction Group, which was created in Kharkiv in 1994. In this photo series, artists and their friends re-enact German soldiers during the occupation of Kharkiv during World War II. Khimei and Malaschuk repeat the gesture and re-enact russian occupiers during the russian invasion of Ukraine.

Colored woodcut on paper.
Courtesy Collection M HKA, Antwerp / Collection Flemish Community.

Kerry James Marshall responds radically to the quasi-absence of black people in art by developing a depiction of them. His monumental print Untitled, 1998-1999 offers a peaceful everyday life scene. In the center of the composition, there is a company of six people conversing in the living room. The group of people is conditional, it's unclear who they are and why they are together, and it seems like it doesn't matter: the image stretches far behind this scene showing walls cutaway of the block house they're in.

The piece itself is fragmented into twelve wooden panels and each part of the print could be perceived as a separate artwork. The viewer has an illusion of control over the print, sliding from left to right, from one part of the painting to another, and choosing what to look at. The painting has its own rhythm built by depicting spacial pauses which brings a cinematic dramaturgy of the one-shot filming. By giving so much attention to, from first sight, unnecessary details such as walls cutaway, the artist makes this artwork routine and even more about everyday domestic comfort.

A peaceful scene from the everyday life depicted by Marshall is both calming and disquieting in understanding of its inaccessibility. Being incapable to reach lost stability of the peacetime, the only thing one can do is notice the manifestations of beauty in everyday existence, to stay human being able to see the glimmer of hope.

The Observer, 2010

Lightbox.
Courtesy Collection M HKA, Antwerp / Collection Flemish Community.

Forever Umai, 2010

Lightbox.
Courtesy Collection M HKA, Antwerp / Collection Flemish Community.

Tengri Boy, 2010

Lightbox.
Courtesy Collection M HKA, Antwerp / Collection Flemish Community.

The three images in light boxes The Observer, Forever Umai, and Tengri Boy, 2010 are key moments stills, from Kazakhstan-born artist Almagul Menlibayeva's film Milk of Lambs, 2010. In this work, Menlibayeva researches the rebuilding of national identity in Kazakhstan after the fall of the Soviet Union, often referencing religious or mythological scenes and concepts that take their beginning from the Shamanistic traditions of Kazakh nomads.

A young woman covering her eyes with dead foxes impersonates a contemporary portrait of a Kazakh woman. In the Forever Umai, one can see the goddess of fertility and virginity Umai with a man who lies at her feet hugging a sheep. It's unclear if both of them — the sheep and the man — are dead or alive. In the third still, Tengri Boy, the artist places a modern impersonation of the god of creation Tengri, who repeats a gesture of holding a sheep — a symbol of the protection of his own culture. In the images, gods enare young, as the nation after the rebirth.

People stand strong in the endless land, it is the people who determine what is the centre of the world, the centre of society.

Menlibayeva researches the question of the national identity as a counter-colonial practice which was and remains actual in Ukrainian history nowadays. In these works, the artist shows connections between the body and the native landscape of the Steppe, in Kazakhstan, to see the resemblance and build stronger connections with the native land.

Almagul Menlibayeva commonly employs references to her own nomadic heritage and the widespread Shamanistic traditions of Central Asia to construct a personal mythological world. In the mythology of the nomads of Kazakhstan, Tengri is one of the names of the chief deity, god of creation and of the sky. Tengri Boy portrays him as a young man, caringly holding a sheep. Menlibayeva's use of nomadic, pre-Soviet references shows her search for a national Kazakh identity. The revival of Tengri as a boy serves as an attempt to protect the humanist values of Kazakh nomadic culture.

Video.
Courtesy Collection M HKA, Antwerp / Collection Flemish Community.

In 'Fuck Africa' Nastio Mosquito questions the notion of Africa as a construct 'that is fucked up' from a critical point of view. In the same gesture he addresses Europe by pretending he bought it, therewith holding up a mirror of colonisation towards both continents.

The works of Mosquito present a curious provocation in their direct confrontation with the viewer. Mosquito places himself centre stage, adopting different personae, and adopting attitudes from his other experiences of working as an actor, presenter, singer, and media impresario. His work is often described as confronting stereotypes of Africa and its people, which, while not untrue, is only part of the complexity of his work. Mosquito plays with charisma and exoticism, being funny and scary, and entertaining and awkward. We are always left never quite knowing whether we are meeting the real Nástio Mosquito, and yet the works offer a glimpse of a future where we may have a certain freedom to be what we feel, beyond political correctness and the desire to be consumers of cultural difference.

Textile.
Courtesy Collection M HKA, Antwerp / Collection Flemish Community.

Otobong Nkanga made the tapestry Infinite Yield as part of her exhibition Bruises and Shine at M HKA. She started from her drawings and redesigned them on a large scale. The work thematizes the natural wealth of the earth and its exploitation under the influence of supply and demand in a globalized world. Nkanga wants to expose the relationships between the landscape, people and labour. The artist not only addresses situations, but also makes active proposals for thinking about contemporary problems. For example, she investigates the possibility of reinterpreting extracted pits from abandoned mines as underground monuments. This image may seem to refer to surrealistic paintings in the form the artist develops, but her content is very different; the human body is presented as a part of the global natural ecosystem.

Nowadays human intervention into the natural environment and the harm to it is so strong even during a relatively peaceful time. Wars also become a part of the ecosystem and have their impact on the economical and ecological global environment both quite literally and indirectly.

ORLAN-CORPS

Remake of the work exhibited in the ICC in 1980.
Photo on wood.

ORLAN

Robe du MesuRAGE du M HKA, 2012.
Object, cotton.

These rare early works from ORLAN bear witness to her ground-breaking 1970s performances in which she took her own body as an absolute reference. With that body as a measuring reference, she measured two different topics: cultural institutions and streets with the names of a male person. ORLAN does not opt for complaint but for visual conversation, a game in which one can participate, with a joy that concerns what is urgent whilst staying humorous. Orlan's woman is emancipatory and strong. A woman who is in complete control of her body and destiny.

The performances of ORLAN in the 1970s are not only special in their content matter – a woman measuring masculine power in relation to herself – but also in their formal development. They wouldn't have an audience but witnesses that would have to sign off. ORLAN would crawl on the floor and indicate each length with chalk. At the end of the measurement, she would wash the dress she had used for that, and enshrine samples of the dirt in tiny, sealed bottles. One of these she would then hold up in the way that the statue of liberty holds up a torch, with the water containing the dirt being the outcome of her measuring exercise.

Afterwards she translated the performances into scenic installations. In these she would also figure through life size photos, such as these, in which she stands as a guardian of her project.
The dress itself in which the performance was enacted was also to become a relic. After three decades, ORLAN once more measured two institutions, the Andy Warhol Foundation in Pittsburgh and M HKA. This dress was last used in these performances.

Acrylic, marker, pencil on canvas.
Created during the residency BIRUCHIY-PRIMORSK 021 Time not lost.

Exhibits

"One oftentimes fails to notice how the things that very recently belonged in one's everyday life have imperceptibly migrated to cabinets of curiosities. Surrounded by the routine of a recent past, some objects and symbols became usual to the extent of invisibility. On the other hand, things that served us weekdays and weekends, signs that used to shape our environments are now put inside glass cases and turned into museum exhibits.

To me, this removal of everyday objects from their usual surroundings to make them a part of a ritual politics of a commemorative practice looks like insidious trickery. Discerning the outlines of a familiar childhood item under the museum glass, one cannot help but be surprised and subsequently jealous of an external narrative that sort of steals one's private memories. However, these feelings somehow immediately turn into stiff boredom, as the signs of intimate history get drained, neutralised, and start collecting dust under the common gaze. The so-called release of memories has an inherent flavour of the aftertaste of villainy: an object from a family home or a sign from a den of secret memories is forcefully taken, displayed for public view, or renamed. This creates hollows in the depths of one's own memory, subsequently filled by the sagging ground of private past that changes the landscape of a biography. Together with these things given away for display, one loses personal recollections, getting offered a string of ritual determinants instead. I cannot get rid of this feeling that museum displays are a kind of exhibitionist pulling out of a family closet; at the same time, a visit to a museum resembles sleepy intent peering often limited to an eerie divination by the guts of an individual remembrance. The proverbial dirty linen that must not be washed in public is suddenly elevated to a talisman of an era; a scrap of paper or a tangle of hair is emphasised by the museum light, as if lit up by an aureole. The past absorbs the present fending me off with my own things, which in turn become strangely significant in their idleness. An anonymous territory of collective memory slowly but surely consumes the everyday life, and this process is so hopelessly continuous that escaping from it to an alive life is only possible through some insane somersault.

Random pieces of junk of used up everydayness are thrown to the surface of today like rare archaeological finds. Examining them, one assumes the fate of a perverted collector, while time that seemed infinite for a moment instantly forms into a mass of flesh breathing down the neck. One has no choice but to lay a false trail to avoid getting exposed and locked in a display case, turned into yet another memorial oddity."

Vlada Ralko

Human, 2022

Watercolor on paper.
Courtesy of the artist.

Everything Is Mixed Up series, 2022

Watercolor on paper.
Courtesy of the artist.

Exposing the concealed, massive metal and concrete blocks blend with dead human bodies, while bomb-destroyed and mutilated interiors of private homes become visible and tell their story to the public. Photo galleries of our smartphones are a mixture of pictures of destroyed architecture from the internet, war memes, photos of corpses of Russian soldiers, and screenshots of cries for help. Everything Mixed Up is a series by Yevhen Samborsky on the collective ruins.

An allusion to Camille Corot's works, from the Landscapes cycle.
Oil on canvas.
Courtesy of Pavlo Gudimov and Ya Gallery Art Center.

Untitled (Gwangju-Set), 2002

Ink on paper.
Courtesy Collection M HKA, Antwerp / Collection Flemish Community.

In the ensemble of drawings originally presented in the Gwangju biennial Polish artist Wilhelm Sasnal combines different types of drawings, and different narratives, the main one related to the Soviet past of his family accounted as a future. Some of the drawings are referring to the form of cartoons or comic books' drawing style but after reading the inserted into the drawings texts the images start to look disturbing, nevertheless. Through this usage of the entertaining format of comic books the artist invites the viewer to read and reflect inside stories that don't feel as entertaining as their form. In the text windows Sasnal creates a narrative allegedly told by his grandfather who presents facts from Polish history – largely shared by the whole Soviet space – by telling the history of life and of his family as if all still has yet to happen. Intertwined in these main narratives are other disturbing elements – the murder of a president, an underground airport, the production of cocaine, dropping relief supplies …, Nowadays the historical events are so close to us, that no empathy is needed to understand them, but it will take time and looking at them from different angles to come to terms with them, and they will remain unsettling forever.

Sea Mines II, 2002

Oil on canvas.
Courtesy Collection M HKA, Antwerp / Collection Flemish Community.

Like in many other semi-figurative semi-abstract paintings made by Wilhelm Sasnal here it's also almost impossible to say what this image is about from the first glimpse. The title of the painting clarifies that there are sea mines in front of the viewer. The surface where the objects are located recalls a conditional and simplified map or a globe. The shadow of the right mine reveals the presence of a wall behind them. Sasnal found these mines as seemingly outdated artefacts in a small museum on the Polish coast.

In his works, Sasnal often merges elements form the reality and some images that could have taken from subconsciousness. Nowadays the military objects which were suppressed in the imagination as faraway fears of death and loss, are becoming frighteningly real and immediate once more. History is haunting.

My Father's Room, 2002

Oil on canvas.
Courtesy Collection M HKA, Antwerp / Collection Flemish Community.

My Father's Room, 2002 is a painting between figuration and abstraction made by Polish artist Wilhelm Sasnal. Watching through the brushstrokes, which are vividly and obviously deliberately made to be seen, one sees the gradients of grey surface that may slightly evoke the convex surface of an old TV screen. But it is not, this is Sasnal's father's room, viewed from above, as a ground-plan, and it stays disturbingly empty, giving space to the viewer's imagination to surmise what's inside it. A life, the life of Sasnal's grandfather, within its limits.

Rubber paint on paper (300 drawings).
Courtesy of the artist.
Created during the Working Room Residency.

Sugar Gang (Santos), 1999–2010

Chromogenic prints mounted on alu-dibond and framed.
Courtesy Collection M HKA, Antwerp / Collection Flemish Community.

In his artistic practice, Allan Sekula has consistently addressed questions of class and the conditions of labour, in tandem with a spirited and rigorous critique of contemporary capitalism. His work avoids the heroic, favouring instead sequences of images which plot complex economic and social processes. During his career, Sekula has repeatedly returned to the theme of maritime space, pointing out that globalisation started there with the de-flagging of ships and transport, thus becoming extremely cheap because of undercompensated labour. His last major photo ensemble Ship of Fools is based upon a trip around the world of a ship of The International Transport Workers Federation to create awareness of this issue through an exhibition, travelling from port to port.

Sugar Gang is part of this series. It presents a group of dockers from Santos, the largest harbour of Latin-America, loading sugar. The world is linked up and it is linked up primarily through the sea, but it is always the people and their solidarity who embody and materialise these links.

Untitled (the Verticality of the Human Spine), 2010–2013

Wood.
Courtesy Collection M HKA, Antwerp / Collection Flemish Community.

During the last three years of his life (2010–2013) the American artist Allan Sekula worked on an artist museum that accompanied his essayistic ensemble Ship of Fools. The Dockers' Museum contains a gigantic collection of various objects, graphic images, postcards, and prints which the artist purchased, mostly online. This is a large-scale project, where the image of the world is translated from the perspective of the dock labourer. The Museum was initially intended to collect the objects without hierarchy and complete documentation, instead paying attention to the potential of 'minor' objects and the links they create. It gave a vision of the world from the perspective of the docker, being the link between land and sea. Sekula dedicated this work to both historical and contemporary labour solidarity in and around the docks and touched upon a series of topics that became sections of the museum. There is a large Atomic Bomb Section, for example, because dockers were amongst the people who were outside when the first bombs fell on two Japanese harbour cities. One section consists of a single object: the Human Spine Section. The Chiropractor's Life Size Model of a Human Vertebrae included in the collection becomes the collective image of hard labour through the demonstration of the compression of the spines.

Every historical event, such as war, lives on in a variety of artifacts. Some of them find their place in museums, while others linger in people's memory, hearts and homes. And a human body itself becomes a remembrance, as a witness to global challenges in history and our personal stories.

Blue pigments, acrylic binder, brass.
Courtesy Collection M HKA, Antwerp / Collection Flemish Community.

Europe without Borders exists in two parts: a ball in the alloy brass, and a wall painting in blue paint. It is a reflection by the artist on the European Union which he made at the height of the refugee crisis. What if the borders of the European Community were entirely incorporated into the image, he asked himself, and the image therefore turns completely in on itself? He developed a map that could be turned into a geodesic ball, Europe having only borders with itself and becoming a world in and of its own.

Oil on canvas.
Courtesy Collection M HKA, Antwerp / Collection Flemish Community.

"I stopped painting from 1981 to 1985 because it became too suffocating and too existential. And somebody by accident shoved a Super-8 camera in my hands and I started to film. And then I came back. Making images is important in the sense that you need distance...This was the first painting made after the film adventure. And it's actually one of my most conceptual works, and it's based upon an anecdote. The anecdote is from a Dutch writer who was stationed in the Dutch Embassy from 1905 to 1910. And he didn't have enough money to bring his wife over to Berlin. And in those days, you had the grand cafes with very bourgeois interiors, and postcards taken of them. So, every time he went to eat in such places he bought a postcard, and with a red pencil he crossed out the table at which he had eaten, and he sent it to his wife for the duration of five years. So that's why it's called correspondence. It's also the idea of persistence, and homesickness without end." – Luc Tuymans on La Correspondance in "Luc Tuymans: in his own words" by Bean Gilsdorf

How are you? - the most frequently asked question by Ukrainians in conversations with their loved ones. The significance of the work by Tuymans comes down to the feeling and process of missing somebody close, waiting for another message, finding a way of correspondence.

Paths, 2013

Ink on paper, video 10'41''.
Courtesy of the artist.

The Paths was made in 2013. It consists of drawings and a video. The drawings are lines that are part of a trail. Trails are paths we form when we want to shorten the way in order not to follow established, directed routes. But at the same time, we are following someone, who has already walked this path. These paths seem straight to us, but from the side, we see how unique these paths are in their pattern.

Order of Things, 2015

Bar reinforcement, welding, iron wires.
Courtesy of the artist.

The Order of Things was created in 2015. Zvyagintseva turns to her archive sketches, which were made in peacetime. These drawings capture the daily routine: a woman holding a child, a sleeping dog near the window, women collecting berries, and women resting near the sea. They were created during the second year of the war in Ukraine.

The artist has recreated these sketches with iron wire. Part of the picture has fallen off, and the usual order of things has changed.