Ola Yeriemieieva. There was a time and is no more
AUTHOR'S TEXT
When we try to make sense of wartime today, it feels distorted, as if it never really happened. Of course it did, but was it really as the discovered photographs suggest?
The room we explore feels almost like a time trap. A preserved and frozen space, seemingly unaware that the events around it had long since ceased. It has become an archive. Everything remains: albums, furniture, photographs on the walls. It is unclear whose room this was, as it has belonged to many.
The photographs found here are part of the artist's personal archive. She documented her life and the life around her during the several years of the Great War. They capture her surroundings: friends and lovers, the queer community, fellow artists, and everyday life as it was reassembled in fragments. The photographs depict life under shelling, a war that was becoming the norm, and coexisting with art, sexuality, parties, and routine.
The first album found in this room is called Our Family. It was compiled in 2023, at a time when it seemed that the war might end, or at least spare this private world. The following pages in the album reveal a shift: the war enters this room too, becoming background noise, a loss that is no longer somewhere else, but close by. Some of the people we see on the opening pages disappear from the later ones, either physically or symbolically. These photographs become evidence of absence.
In the next room, time works differently. While the first room is an archive, an attempt to preserve and remember, in the second room, loss has taken on form. Death gradually floods the entire space of being and becomes a neighbour. Now the only thing that remains is to accept its presence, allowing it to settle in your room (The Cemetery in My Room, 2025). In the same way, death takes friends and loved ones from our living rooms to the cemetery, prompting us to contemplate moving the living room there too (Living Room, 2025).
About artist:
Ola Yeriemieieva is a multidisciplinary artist. In 2018, she graduated from the Kyiv National University of Technology and Design with a bachelor's degree in graphic design. She studied contemporary art at the Kyiv Academy of Media Arts. Working with photography, painting, and installation, Ola reflects on corporeality, death, sexuality, memory, and loss. Based in Kyiv.
Curator: Anastasia Garazd
Translation: Burshtyna Tereshchenko
The exhibition will open at 5:00 p.m. on July 3 and last until August 3, 2025, in the Mala Gallery (Lavrska St., 10)
Working hours: Wednesday to Sunday, from 12:00 to 19:00
Free admission
❗We care about everyone’s safety, so in case of an air raid alert, the exhibition will be closed. At this time, you can go to the nearest shelter. The exhibition will start working after the end of an air raid alert.