Notation for the Surveyors of the Interminable
I am a Ukraine-born, Finland-based interdisciplinary artist and curator interested in examining the relationships that displaced people construct with physical and imagined spaces. Working through visual arts, performance, and writing I investigate the conditions that construct displaced subjectivity across European contexts.
Among my recent projects is a site-specific photography exhibition “Suspension in Other Terms," which brings into focus the institutional architecture of a reception center in Finland; a lecture-performance on the politics of witnessing “Understanding The Urgency”; and “Two Gardens,” an essay about the ideologically divided plot of land that belonged to my family. Since early 2023, I have also been working as a guest curator in a Ukrainian archive of wartime dance films, Let The Body Speak, developing public programming focused on the changing topographies of war.
Among the recent educational programs I took part in are "Landscape (post) Conflict" summer school at the Irish Museum of Modern Art; "University in Ruins. Scaffolding Futures" Viadrinicum summer school in Viadrina Univercity (Frakfurt (Oder)); and a Method Fund's course on "How Art Utters War."
"Notation for the Surveyors of the Interminable" is born out of my direct experience as a displaced person (war refugee) from Ukraine. In this project's context, I examine refugee infrastructure, which includes both physical sites of refugee accommodation and imagined spaces in which displaced people remain (referring here, e.g., to the visions and memories of our countries of origin).
I have just realised the first exhibition in the context of this project, titled "Suspension in Other Terms." It was a site-specific photographic exhibition documenting a refugee reception center in Halikko (Salo, Finland) where it was also presented. It was created from the desire to re-present the immediate material conditions of the site in ways that bring (back) to light the naturalized agents of state control present within the reception center, while acknowledging my own—photographer's—surveilling position (with my gaze, however, reversed—directed back at the institution instead of its dwellers). Simultaneously, this work intended to acknowledge and visually reflect on what might be understood as a more common or generalized refugee experience: being suspended bureaucratically, spatially, and temporally; waiting; repeatedly confronting matters of death; configuring oneself anew, or facing the imperative to do so, being pressured into configurations not of one's choosing. Suspension in Other Terms also drew from observations of the repetitive nature of refugee infrastructure: how buildings, waiting rooms, and various other accommodations maintain similar visual and spatial patterns even when they are located in places geographically distant from each other.
I began photographing this site in early 2025, when I was invited there to work on a separate socially engaged project. Before visiting the reception center for the first time, I had already been familiar with the reception system I myself had been a part of as a Ukrainian refugee.