Under such title, in Jönköping, on December 17 - 21, 2024, the Kulturhuset held a joint exhibition of Ukrainian and Swedish artists who work with different media. It raised the question of how symbiosis affects the preservation and transformation of cultural identities.
The artists from Kherson (Ukraine), having survived the occupation and scattered to different cities in Sweden and Estonia, explored how people who have left their homeland because of the war interact with the new environment and how these encounters affect their identity to express the uniqueness of this exchange in the face of uncontrollable and massive changes.
When they invited me to curate the Symbiosis project, I was happy to finally see them. We went through many things together in Kherson, both before Russia's invasion of Ukraine (carefree times, looking back) and under the occupation, whose horrific experience would have been better if it never happened, but it is with us forever.
So, we had a lot to talk about, particularly integrating, as returning to Kherson is impossible due to heavy shelling. We started with what “symbiosis” means for everyone. After three years in a foreign country, some are more or less successfully integrating, and others are still guests, ready to leave at any moment. But all are united by the trauma of breaking up with their beloved city. And they have been saturating local spaces with this trauma in various artistic and non-artistic ways for almost all this time.
In sum, the artists offered diverse visions of symbiosis and degrees of its “success.” For some, it is a mutually beneficial collaboration. Others prefer to cure their pain in symbiosis with nature. The narrative of suffering intertwines with the narration of the therapeutic practice of releasing creative energy via an interaction with the environment.
Symbiosis can be a profoundly implicit process. Rather, it is about finding points of contact for the individual before and the one after the disaster. The traumatic and, at the same time, enriching effect of such metamorphoses is represented in the complex relationship between the personal and the social, with its ritualistic nature, which requires considerable mental and intellectual effort to accept and incorporate.
In any case, the Symbiosis is a serious attempt to look around, to show interest in the unfamiliar environment, to reflect on the new reality, and to collaborate with local cultural institutions. To create something that resonates with Swedes on a universal level. Just before the opening, I read in a Facebook publication that "Europeans get tired of war, but never of culture and art" (it belongs to a German).
However, a person in times of disaster is a resonant topic. It turns out that everyone here in Sweden has already received instructions on how to behave in case of war. The calm that prevails here is external, and a feeling of the approaching end of the world is seeping into the collective consciousness.
Actually, my friends live in Tranås (southern Sweden) and successfully cooperate with the local cultural center Kultivera. Its director, Colm Kiernan, an Irishman by birth and a poet by vocation, is a dedicated person who tirelessly seeks ways to promote Ukrainian artists. He wrote three new poems for Exodus, Enlightenment, and Transformation by Kostiantyn Tereshchenko.
Traditionally, illustrating a text is a well-established collaboration between artists and writers. They decided to rethink this tradition – the poet created a linguistic form based on a graphic image:
worker ants who crossed
over to understandings
of human condition –
their unique position
beyond routine obscenity –
of structured normality
of non-achievement
of shallow transcendence
of stagnant excellence –
of cruel decadence
this realised
this learned but not evolved –
which is explaining – everything
experiencing - nothing
like falling in love
an idea
a language so
voluptuous –
sumptuous
but only
in the mind.
“I believe in symbiosis as a form of mutually beneficial cooperation in a world often dominated by the inadequate manifestations of human nature,” the artist states. “When a storm of madness and violence rages in the collective consciousness, symbiosis becomes a key form of interaction.”
The cooperation with the cultural center based on a former match factory is a stepping stone for further promising projects. Such historically layered places as revitalized red-brick factories are my love, with their atmosphere of freedom and zero hierarchy. When we needed to find stands for ceramics, we just took these old bricks. And it worked out just fine - because the ceramics by Swedish artist Ester Svensson (Skillingaryd), with who a Kherson artist Mariia Zahurska collaborates, often deal with a notion of home, both as a dreamy comfort and a trap that consumes all your resources.
Describing the I bought a house, now it owns me sculpture (glazed stoneware, 2024), Ester tries to reveal the dualistic nature of “being settled down”: “I stopped moving around from place to place. Committed to a specific piece of land, took on ownership and responsibility. Indebted myself financially, created a way of life that revolves around staying put. Buying mattresses. Feeling sometimes trapped and crushed by the old timber walls. But home is safety, security, and stability – often longed for, now gained. Following the garden and forest outside through the seasons, planting seeds in the spring and harvesting in the autumn. Chopping wood to prepare for the far-off winter. Dreaming up plans that might materialize years from now. Somewhere my children will remember the place they grew up. The privilege of it all, and the weight of it all.”
Mariia Zahurska created the sculpture Family Tree in collaboration with Ester Svensson.
A drop of blood spreads over many profiles. Lamenting one's fate and the apocalypse of humanity with bloody tears is a metaphor as old as time. Passing through numerous cycles of creation and destruction, blood formation, and bloodshed, we move into an uncertain future, burdened by the growing suffering of the present and the bitter memory of the past. Billions of faces of the dead and the living, connected by the red vessel of joint history, seem to say: "No man is an island.”
We wanted to present our art community creatively, not through dry texts. Finally, we had the happy idea of reconstructing the children’s hut and decorating the interior with photos of happy days in Kherson. It resulted in the creation of an interactive installation Halabuda (hut). All children love to set up small hiding places made of chairs, pillows, blankets, or rugs. This nostalgic gesture is a desperate attempt to recreate the territory, isolated from the interference of harsh reality, where you are in control, and nothing bad will ever happen. Of course, the children were thrilled, along with the adults, especially those not too lazy to climb inside.
The title of the exhibition, together with its motto, "Weaving debris of identity, migration, and liminality," was revealed from the very first moment of its opening. Again, I did not want to start with an official speech, so we invited the Swedish artist Stina Nilsson to adapt her performance Livets bördor (The Burden of Life), about finding comfort in the fact that none of us can escape the nature of suffering and impermanence, to the theme of the exhibition.
It was a sensitive, intimate, dramatic performance under the music of Kherson musician and composer Anton Kosiei. We covered the word KHERSON with flour, and Stina, moving and freeing from the “hump” (the accumulated burden), began to spread it all over – an illustration of the blurring of identity when the distance from home increases for years... And that becomes a new burden. The reaction of our guests was predictable - the empathy just hung in the air.
Everyone appreciated the gloomy beauty of the project How Much of Me Ended Up in the Trash? by Anastasia Tereshchenko (the documented site-specific performance).
It is a brilliant metaphor for losing oneself and the fear of transformation under the influence of wars and personal crises. The dumpster is the perfect setting for a ritual farewell to the past: “My symbiosis is not about adapting to a new environment, but about finding a connection between who I was before the war and who I am now, weaving the experience of motherhood into a new fabric.”
The central image is a white dress with ruffles Anastasiia bought on the eve of the war, a month before the birth of her child, as a romantic symbol of a happy future. The irony is that it came to the owner only two years later and was already “irrelevant.” The war knocked it out of its harsh, completely non-romantic context. Thus, the dress became a marker of lost dreams.
On its hem is the Emigrants, a small sculpture by an Outsider artist, Oleksandr Pecherskii, - embodying the collective cry of mothers in the hostile reality of war (Oleksandr survived the occupation and still lives in Kherson). When Anastasiia saw it on his Facebook page, she immediately bought it.
The installation unites the dress and the sculpture, creating a dialogue between the past and the present, examining the gap between expectations and reality: “Everything we throw away tells a story of who we once were. The question - How much of me ended up in the trash? - becomes an attempt to document how much of ourselves we lose in adapting to new circumstances."
For her collages in the Transgenerational Changes series (in collaboration with Magnus Grehn, Tranås, Sweden), Olha Kriuchkovska collected fragments of the new reality – some of them from the first day she left the occupation, and most of them belong to Sweden. A pebble here, a stone there, a dried plant elsewhere – a road map of painful memory is ready.
In the center of the panel is an open wound, which seemed to be an echo of Anish Kapoor's bloody massacre at the Venice Biennale 2022. The relief of the wound bears the imprint of the Swedish landscape and a fragment of the Ukrainian embroidery. The fragility of the paper suggests that the wound will heal over time, and only a scar will remain. The collages frame this wound, preventing it from spreading further.
Also, Olha created folk masks as an homage to Malanka, a ritualistic holiday on New Year's Eve, when people dress up as animals or folklore characters and drive a goat, going from house to house and singing carols.
The artist decided to explore similar images in Scandinavian mythology. The installation is crowned with a stylized mask of the majestic stag Eikthyrnir: “Finding myself in this fairy-tale forest after a meeting with death, I want to find something familiar, something from my past life. But the forest is different, and the spirits in it are different too. While searching for what is mine, I gradually acquire the features of other creatures. The cast I made of my face has undergone numerous transformations – into a Christmas goat and a deer because these two animals are conduits between the world of the living and the dead, the world of people and gods.”
The red necklace from home on the stag’s chest is the most delicate reference to the identity issue.
The therapeutic value of escaping into nature in the collapsing world has been practiced throughout the ages, and we are no exception. It is the message of exquisite collages I am in nature. Nature in me by Viktoriia Berezina. She created this series in the winter of 2023-2024 when she was very depressed. It is about a journey to the source of strength in nature, about the fragility of life and the transience of time: "Impressions of the magical landscapes of Estonia, where I now live, intertwine with memories of the landscapes of my homeland, devastated and mutilated by war. Self-healing and regaining integrity take time and patience but ultimately lead to finding a place in new surroundings.”
Serhii Serko, with his landscapes as “geography of trauma,” shares the desire to capture the evolution of perception of new landscapes. Losing your home is the death of a whole world that existed inside you. Even if your body keeps moving, your soul remains torn: one part belongs to your roots, and the other is trying to survive in a foreign land. Nature becomes an arena of struggle: with yourself, the world, and what remains of your past. Each brush stroke is a metaphor for the cracks in your soul: foggy horizons, cold landscapes, lines that seem imperfect as if something was deliberately destroyed.
It is not about beauty but about the alienation and indifference of nature to our pain. That is why the landscapes look simultaneously familiar and hostile. Over time, nature begins to speak, and its language is patience. Its answer is a thousand little things: the rustle of grass, a drop of rain, light falling through the branches. Later, the cold colors are replaced by soft accents that symbolize hope. Gradually, from A Migrant’s Dream to Change of Provider, the boundaries of nature dissolve, the colors merge, and you stop distinguishing between “yours” and “others.”
Oleksandra Paranchenko literally weaved a story about the search for shelter. Her Cocoons were born of despair: “Arriving in a new country, without belongings and familiar surroundings, I spent whole days on a deserted riverbank surrounded by forest. One day, tired of walking, I sat down on the grass near a large bush, and my hands, as if automatically, began to weave a cocoon of branches and grasses.”
After the space of pain, the viewers entered the space of irony – all of our artists admit the triggering feeling of unreality and theatricality of the new environment. It looks like a set for the Truman Show with its surrealist vibe. When you lose touch with real life, landing in a zone of liminality, the fear of losing oneself, memory, and sensitivity to the disaster happening in the native country mixes with a normal curiosity about another culture and embedding in an existentially different coordinate system.
Serhii Radionov reflects on The Sensitive Issue through a series of graphic works: "This is my personal story, as well as the story of those who live in Sweden, based on a question we hear from people very often: When are you going to start learning Swedish? I ask myself this question, and it is a question that concerns all of us. Everyone has heard it and thinks about it to some extent. Every communication with Swedes involves it.”
The Nuclear Theater of the Absurd by Marianna Tarish frightens at first with the seriousness of the apocalyptic inevitability. But our southern humor keeps the guests from falling into the abyss of horror. Turning bombs into colored eyes that explode with rainbows, Marianna "conjures" the madness that has engulfed the world, depicting everything as the script of life she lives in – “being written spontaneously and impromptu at this very moment. It is impossible to predict what tomorrow will bring.”
Take Your Inner Radiance to Light a Cigarette by Olena Hnatiuk conveys a moment of inner reflection blended with silent despair. We see a girl lost in herself, and a flame seems to burst from her – not wild and destructive but stable, almost soothing. This flame symbolizes her pain, deeply hidden but always present. She neither resists nor fears it but does not seek to escape it. Instead, she turns it into a tool: she calmly lights a cigarette on the fire growing inside her chest. This gesture is about a complete acceptance, even use, of the pain as something so mundane that it is no longer essential.
And the highlight is the video poem Where Are We Now, My Friend? by Mykyta Hryshko in collaboration with Sara Isaksson (Stockholm, Sweden).
It deals with a small fragment of reality, two years in the life of a group of people who, through a storm of changes and events, found refuge in a place they never thought they would find themselves in such circumstances. The film is about people, fear, gratitude, and hope. And about the possibility of not losing oneself, even when the ground is slipping away. And the journey called "life" is gaining speed. A speed and a journey we are never ready for but that we have to accept, trying to keep hope alive even in the darkest of times.
We shared so many beautiful moments of empathy and enthusiastic feedback from the Swedish audience that I left with a light heart. Now I see – the pain has not overcome them, and the art of Kherson lives on.
Yuliia Manukian, curator of the SYMBIOSIS project, cultural journalist, curator of art and urban projects (Kherson, Ukraine), laureate of the Vaclav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent 2023
Comentários