Camera Obscura

The works included in the Lviv Diary series are a response to the daily horrors of war, created using the “fast technique” of watercolor and ball pen sketching. They present Vlada Ralko’s critical view on the Russian aggression and genocide of the Ukrainians. It is worth noting that Lviv Diary is a follow-up to the earlier series Kyiv Diary, which was created in 2013-2014 during the Revolution of Dignity; it comprised, among others, pieces created in response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the commencement of warfare in the east of Ukraine.

Criticism of the field of interaction continues in the work You Did Not Train Me Enough for This Fight by artist Brilant Milazimi from Kosovo. The plot relies on a combination of individual and collective memory, offering an intuitive analysis of contemporary conditions of struggle and negotiation, balancing feelings of hope, freedom, and fragmentation of reality. Milazimi's work is neither allegorical nor anecdotal. It is a visually powerful articulation of the suppressed, where social interaction is easily overshadowed by deeper tensions. He transforms his perception of the world around him into images that are bitter, funny, tender, and strange all at once. Driven by the mechanism of the unconscious and inspired by imagined universes, he finds ominous and poetic expressions to approach the society in which he lives.

The work Frequencies of Trauma by Bulgarian multidisciplinary artist Krasimira Butseva explores history, memory, trauma, and political violence associated with Bulgarian communism. The artist assumes the roles of anthropologist, sociologist, and historian, challenging the democratizing qualities of photography and digital imagery, and demonstrating the inability of objective representation through photography and digital images. The democratic nature of image dissemination moves photographic representation from the realm of aesthetics to that of human interaction, and therefore, politics. In Frequencies of Trauma, history is told through objects and images, and the artist is an active participant in their collection, curation, and preservation. In this work Krasimira Butseva questions the role of cultural and political institutions and their active neglect in critically examining the problematic past of the communist regime in the current transitional period. The images represented in 'Frequencies of Trauma' are often incomplete, distorted, and fragmented, existing in a transitional space between conflict and resolution. Through this technique, Butseva captures the liminal nature of memory and history.

The second part of the exhibition display begins with the multimedia project entitled Backyard, the artist collective Open Group. The work reflects on the eponymous notion that implies privacy and property, the feeling of safety. Safety ensured by walls, by the law of private property and law in general. This brings about the notion of home as a place that only belongs to its dweller, as opposed to everything that surrounds it, belonging to others and being less private and safe. A backyard is also the only place that stays after a house is demolished, wiped off the face of the earth. This work allows the viewer to take a look at a house destroyed by war. For the participants in the project who have lost their own homes, this is an attempt to imagine and recreate them in their minds.