Olena Turyanska. Agape. Absolute love (Curatorial text)
The language we employ to talk about war is induced to be the language of lack and existential chasms, and that’s noticeable. Do you remember when we were seeking to come up with the right words? At first, there was always a critical lack of them to describe the complex reality and immeasurable grief, death, and loss. As time passed, it seemed that there were too many of them, all featureless and gaunt. We were looking for the words of love. The words to share the pain through. That is why we learn to discern the inexpressible in language, to speak with great attention to silence, and to intonate the emptiness where the meaning we pursue could emerge. We learn to capture crucial stories that are slipping out of future archives and museums into the light and through the gaps and voids.
In this exhibition, artist Olena Turyanska literally cuts this experience out of blackness:
Empty of sound,
Empty of ideas,
Just emptiness —
The emptiness of everything.
No, this is not a poem. This is the story of photographer Alberto Giuliani, who documented the traces of hard labour on the skin of medics in a hospital during the COVID-19 pandemic. He described a fully-crowded space, but empty at the same time. A space of experiencing overwhelming helplessness, vulnerability, exhaustion, and devastation caused by the ineffectiveness of human efforts. Those feelings mark the struggle of the bravest. The space between life and death is a concentrated, committed, and comprehensive struggle for life. “These are intimate moments, moments of absolute human struggle, and they will transcend this time, acting as records of those on the frontlines endured,” as art critic Hannah Abel-Hirsch denoted it.
In a sense, Olena Turyanska’s exhibition is anti-metaphorical. It poses a direct and open-ended question, offering a starting point for reflections:
How do you avoid letting yourself disappear as a human being under the pressure of tragic circumstances?
The project grows out naturally from her earlier artistic practice and develops the subjects that are inherent to Turyanska: memory, the interrelationship of space and time, and the search for the balance between the external and the internal. At the same time, it reveals a new experience from recent years, which we might call (co)experiencing History.
The artist establishes a coherent space where her memory, the memories of people she knows, and their ways of recording stories/history constitute a narrative. This narrative encompasses today’s condition of fear, fatigue, loss, trauma, and ultimately finding the strength to live on and not forget. “It’s people who die, not love” is one of the project’s key messages. It highlights that being integral is a valuable quality for history, tradition, and relationships while at the same time emphasizing the importance of an individual, their disposition and potential for action, and personal matters echoing in the universal and vice versa.
Plato and the ancient Greek philosophers deduced the concept of agápē, which gave the name to this exhibition, from their awareness of this interconnectedness. They used it to denote the supreme form of love — unconditional, inclusive, divine, and all-encompassing, broader than interpersonal. Love that is rather volitional than reduced to sacrificial. Love that does not arise through rational evaluation or the logic of exchange but instead, through care, gives value to the other, the environment, and life.
A particular ethos runs through this form of love and through the work of Olena Turyanska. It may be outlined through a culture of gift, a subtle perception of everyone’s vulnerability and its protection, a sensitivity to what’s vanishing, and a devotion to engaging in dialogue and cooperation. Therefore, in a certain sense, this exhibition takes the form of an “open monograph” structure. To shape it, the artist involves the authors and poetry pieces that are meaningful to her. It is rather a conversation or a “text in progress” than a written chronicle of a person and society at war.
The project consists of artworks created mainly in 2023–2024. There are also some artworks from the earlier period which are significant for the recollection. Turyanska has been embroidering, glueing, and cutting paper during and between air alarms, keeping in mind her friends and acquaintances at and nearby the frontline. For this reason, all works carry deeply personal experiences.
Light and its dramaturgy are as significant to defining space and meaning as physical objects. Shadows are telling as they reveal subtexts that are not visible under direct light. Within this project, the artist seems to balance between life and non-being all the time. She transforms the palpable, the living, and the tactile into signs, shadows, and scars. Then, she returns to reality in found objects that bear the evident marks of time. It is this artistic optics of “cycles” (the title of an earlier prominent artwork series by Turyanska) that challenges the boundaries of the visual. In this way, it reflects the tenderness of affection and the acute feeling of the likelihood of losing what you love. This feeling brings together all human beings and illuminates our shared desire to love more.
Turyanska began her artistic journey in the 1990s by painting icons on glass and became known due to her reinterpretations of traditional Ukrainian paper-cutting. Therefore, she is well aware of the transparency, delicacy, and fragility of materials. For this project, on par with conventional graphic materials, for the first time, the artist also uses non-artistic, namely, construction ones like windproof membranes, roofing felt underlay, rubber paint, etc. Those originally belong to interior design, another speciality of hers. The durability of these materials contrasts with the instability of memory as a whole and all the distinct memories while their literal link to the concepts of “reconstruction” and “restoration” may be subliminally perceived as a belief that the thread of memory is a heavy-duty one. Turyanska extends the life of everyday objects that in one way or another keep the marks of corporeality, physical presence, work, life, and death. She turns them into artworks, into “reified” poetry: hospital mattress pads, second-hand, found objects, salt. Mixed media, photography, collage, and embroidery, displayed in a pointwise fashion within the exhibition, contribute to reinforcing the impressions of craftsmanship, quotability, and vulnerability of the material which are crucial for the project.
Formally, Turyanska’s artworks are abstractions of various degrees — a landscape losing details in motion, a map, house details being reduced to geometric shapes, ballistic drawings-schemes, rows of square-shaped ceramic tiles, or imprints of the art studio worktops. However, this abstraction of hers is neither escapist nor decorative. Just like Occam’s razor, it pierces deep into the thickness of the essence of things and cuts off everything fake or inferior. Turyanska’s art causes tectonic shifts in our mindsets and manifests the non-obvious phenomena: the way the worlds of what’s gone and the living and our capacity for unconditional love mutually affect each other.
The reality in this fluid state appears to come as what is deep within us and our experiences: a dream, memory, recovery, return to life, or recollection. This personal reality dissolves in the flow of History and gives one strength to live through the war, is based on a wide array of cultural references — from antiquity to contemporary poetry. At the same time, it is also the experience of building up (brick by brick, like a house) one’s identity and one’s history as part of a larger common History, where everything is interconnected. This is the only way for the tradition to stay uninterrupted. “Moloch,” “Memory,” “Dreams,” “Lapidarium,” and “Love” are the titles the artist assigned to each of the exhibition halls. They are meant to symbolise certain stages of transition, internal transformation caused by losing and finding experiences, and travel in time.
… What’s one’s place in History? In history the way the philosopher Volodymyr Yermolenko refers to it: “The worst sense of this word. Like the story of an Ogre abducting your children or the story of the Minotaur, to whom you sacrifice the best.” How can one fill the void of what’s lost? Agape may be the answer. Witnessing with love.