You do not choose the place of birth and growth. Perhaps that is why they often appear only as a backdrop to life — very comprehensive and mundane. Feelings for them can also be different - from tenderness to the desire to escape. However, no matter how our relationship with them develops, we retain the opportunity to visit these important places and see them firsthand.

‍

However, war shatters the familiar world, destroys the connections between places and people. It selects the past and the future along with the possibility of choice. To leave, to leave, to flee — in this state there is no place for feelings and awareness, there is only the “now” thread and the subsequent frightening unknown. When after a little peace comes and life takes on its usual shape, there is an awareness of your own fragmentation, of breaking ties with the past — with a place that was the embodiment of memories of childhood, a place where a part of you remained. Since then, the answer to the everyday question “Where are you from?” ceases to be automatic. It gives rise to numerous fears, which the figure of Ukrainian emigration, linguist Yuriy Shevelev aptly summed up with the word “groundlessness” — the fear of starting everything over and over again, of not having a place in the world, of losing not only the material acquired, but also oneself, one's language and one's environment.

‍

For many generations of Ukrainians, groundlessness has been the result of systematic extermination, repression, wars and occupations. Again and again we had to regain our identity, to preserve its meager remains, to build a home in new places and continents. Constant loss is like an eternal return, where everything familiar and close is erased, becomes phantom pain in the body. This eternal return has no ethnicity. It unites all those for whom the Ukrainian territory has become a home under different historical circumstances — Crimean Tatars, Priazov Greeks, Jews, Georgians, Armenians, Poles, Roma and many others. For those who have lost their home, memories are the only way to get closer to it. In their spacious pavilions, we are able to imagine ourselves among familiar objects, wander from street to street, relive forgotten sensations, and grow sprouts of life on fragments. These journeys are not just mnemonic exercises, but resistance to the changes that inevitably occur in our absence.

‍

“Between Farewell and Return” is an exhibition about real and familiar places, to which it is impossible to return. Therefore, they turn into ephemeral and fluid spaces of memories. Through artistic practices, artists and artists approach these places, reconstruct family histories and childhood landscapes, reflect on the intersections of cultures and resistance to oblivion. Art as the embodiment of imagination allows us to reinvent and revive broken ties, to recover images and words where they seemed to have been destroyed forever. It was the experience of loss that gave us the key to the messages left in the Di-Pi camps (ang. Displaced Persons), during the Holocaust, forced labor, deportation, and during the Russian-Ukrainian war in 2014 and 2022. Therefore, the time between farewell and return becomes a moment to search for words, rediscover forbidden erased stories and realize one's own place in each of them. This is the time to choose what the places we have left will remember in the future. A future where we become the stories we tell about ourselves.

‍

Curators of the exhibition: Natasha Chichasova and Asya Tsisar.
Junior curator: Anastasia Garazd.

The opening of the exhibition will take place on May 30. The exposition can be visited until August 4, 2024.

‍

Working hours:

May 30, Thursday: from 17:00 to 21:00 (entrance to the territory is available from 16:00)
May 31, Friday: from 10:00 to 21:00
June 1, Saturday: from 10:00 to 21:00
June 2, Sunday: from 10:00 to 21:00

June 5 — August 4: from 12:00 to 20:00 (except Mondays and Tuesdays).

‍