‘The hand of history

Turns over the hourglass

The page of the manual

The world upside-down

Peels the blue orange

It’s just that the shell is red’

Ella Yevtushenko, poem from the fifth day of the war.

On February 24, 2022, at 4 a.m., the first Russian bombs broke the night’s silence. she stitches together as a diary, so as not to dissolve in the wave of violence. When the hourglass indicates the worst, consequences emerge that impact the whole country. At the centre of this tragedy, young Ukrainian photography stages the fractures of the present day. A majority of women artists are represented in the exhibition, who lead us to encounter a new ecopoetics. Iva Sidash collects evidence from vulnerable zones. Oleksandra Zborovozka stages the intimate psychic trauma. Elena Subach follows a secret path of chairs that serve as resting places for refugees. Veronika Mol stitches daily Polaroids as a form of reparation. Xenia Petrovska invents the lava of a volcano that overpowers all life, unless it’s the scarlet juice of a blood orange that should be drunk as an antidote to the end of the world. These images create a subjective narrative of a war whose shadow hovers over each of us. They combine poetry with the urgent documentation of reality. Resistance and resilience are expressed in a collective chorus, and the ‘nezlamnist’ (unbreakability) of a nation is revealed.

An exhibition curated by Camille Leprince.

In cooperation with the Ukrainian Institute in Germany