FROM 1914 TILL UKRAINE

The group show FROM 1914 TILL UKRAINE provides a dialogue between works of 10 Ukrainian contemporary artists who are dealing with the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war and selected paintings by Otto Dix. While Dix's works address his experiences at the front in World War I and as a prisoner of war in World War II, the Ukrainian artists respond with their works to the dramatic situation in their homeland since 2014. Thus, the project is dedicated to a century of European experience of war.

The "long 19th century," which British historian Eric Hobsbawm considered to be the period from the French Revolution to 1914, was followed by the "short 20th century’’, which, in his view, ended in 1991 with the fall of the Soviet Union — the last empire. Today, however, we see Russia continuing to make imperial claims to power, indeed strengthening again by conquering countries that previously existed within the borders of the USSR. The 20th century is still continuing — when will it end?

The painter Otto Dix (1891-1969) glanced from the trenches of the Great War into the eyes of horror without a face or a name and captured it in his art works. Depicting the funnels and trenches around him, Dix hoped to close the door on the atrocities in our world. 

A century has passed, and Katya Buchatska (*1987, Kyiv) stands at the edge of the funnel in the destroyed village of Moshchun in the Kyiv region and asks herself what future memorials of the Russia-Ukraine war might look like. The video This World is Recording (2023) represents her artistic approach to commemorative instruments using landscapes and plants.