One more dawn

Voloshyn Gallery is pleased to announce One more dawn, Svitlana Ratoshnyuk solo exhibition. The project engages with the consequences of the Russo-Ukrainian war, not by documenting the actual events, but by understanding the war as a process of long-term erasure of forms, images and familiar signs. 

The artist turns to a reduced, almost symbolic language of images, where silhouette, color and process become key. Her works form a space of tension between the recognizable and the disturbing. Landscape, symbols and objects interact, forming a nonlinear chronicle.

The black paper cut-outs of the series Sriblyansky Forest and Sunflower ​​appeal to the image of the Ukrainian landscape as a space of loss. Sriblyansky Forest, a famous location in the Kharkiv region, is now almost destroyed as a result of military action and constant shelling, currently appearing as a fragmented, “burnt-out” silhouette. The forest exists in the paper cut-outs as a mere shadow of its former self. In the Sunflower series, endless fields are transformed into a rhythmic line of repeating forms. It becomes a continuous movement along the territory that has lost its idyllic nature and has been turned into a zone of silent observation.

At the heart of the exhibition is the Kyiv Dawn installation made of black polyethylene film, resembling a festive air balloon, a familiar object present at numerous children's celebrations. Its shape is immediately recognizable as the head of Mickey Mouse. The polyethylene material, associated with rubbish or death, comes into sharp conflict with the celebratory shape. Joy and anxiety coexist next to an all-absorbing emptiness. During the exhibition, the balloon transforms, gradually losing its shape, deflating, becoming devoid of its identity and creating an amorphous presence. This transformation becomes a reflection of the depreciation and destruction of symbols of security and joy in conditions of war and conflict.

The red spots on the walls function as ambiguous symbols that can be interpreted as future dawns, danger signals, or traces of violence. The material texture emphasizes the tension, transforming the color into an independent bearer of meaning.

Svitlana Ratoshniuk’s works form a realm on the threshold between festivity and desolation, where familiar images exist in a state of gradual disintegration. It is a condition of unstable equilibrium, in which the boundaries between opposing poles are constantly blurred. This zone functions as a transitional field where the experience of loss becomes a key means of understanding reality.