I Dreamt… Did I Dream…?

Voloshyn Gallery is pleased to present the exhibition “I Dreamt… Did I Dream…?," the first solo exhibition by the artist Sana Shahmuradova Tanska at the Kyiv gallery.

Constructing her works around non-verbal experience, the ideas related of the conventionality of place and the conventionality of time, Shahmuradova Tanska expresses important changes in human character that are happening to her generation. The traumatic impact of the current war on consciousness compelled the artist to look for signs that replace the trauma of loss and the wounds of ruination. Her main goal is to capture the emotional traces of those events, the knowledge of which is existentially important for us today — the history of genocides in the Ukrainian historical context and beyond.

The space of dreams and their recollection provide the source for the narrative that the artist has developed. The viscosity of her paintings, with their melancholic aesthetics, half-formed images and repeated motifs, indicates exhaustion from the war. The tone on her canvases are camouflaged as mould. As you look closely at the paintings, the silt and water take on a significant presence as characters in her stories. These silted-up paintings speak with the voices of tens of thousands people, who merge into an alarming chorus. Is it swimming in pain, or rather searching for something stable at the bottom to lean on... Mourning, reflections on the cyclical nature of violence and acceptance of the experience of those who have survived become a work that is inscribed in the artist's daily practice in her studio.

Her aim is to put this phenomenological experience into an exclusively optical, aesthetic form. Images from previous eras and contexts spontaneously appear in Shahmuradova’s paintings, sometimes reminiscent of worn frescoes on the walls of cathedrals, mystical surreal spaces in Remedios Varro’s paintings or Magritte’s kisses with faces wrapped in fabric form. In the end, it is matter that transcends its own limits in Shahmuradova’s works, beginning to resemble the idea of a sound wave and ultra-fine vibrations. In Shahmuradova Tanska’s new project, there is a hint of the impossibility of creating an image being in a state of excitement, and at the same time an idealistic faith in the viewer’s empathic reaction. This is a story about the voice and light inside what we see. We do not become emancipated and spiritually connected overnight. We gain freedom when we use our voices to let the voices we keep inside us speak.